Bananas are taken for granted today as part of the diet of ordinary people in industrial countries. In the Windward Islands of the Caribbean, bananas provided around one-third of all jobs and half their export earnings – until recent WTO rulings began to undermine the industry. Much of this trade and employment has now disappeared as a result of these rulings; and at the end of 2005, the EU is due to give up the last non-tariff measures designed to enable this trade to continue. Unemployment, poverty, and further emigration therefore loom over these islanders, or the tempting alternative of growing and trading in illegal drugs. And all because WTO rules take too little account of the problems of tiny island economies and the human cost of rigid application of global free-trade rules.
In this absorbing history, Gordon Myers tells the extraordinary story of how the US government, in response to grievances of one American corporation, led the World Trade Organisation to nullify a European Community commitment to protect the livelihood of small Caribbean banana growers. The WTO's own working practices also emerge as inflexible and myopic.
The story illustrates the inadequacy of an international trading system dominated by free-trade ideology but lacking the flexibility necessary to enable very small and highly vulnerable states, like the Windward Islands, to receive the protection that they need in order to survive. Moreover, increasingly powerful supermarket chains are able to exploit this free-trade framework to insist on ever lower prices, to the short-term benefit of consumers but the serious detriment of growers in the developing world.
This book is a call for new arrangements in the EU that will enable the Caribbean banana industry to survive beyond 2005, and for an outlook in the WTO that gives greater consideration to the needs of very small states with vulnerable economies.