America continues in its attempt to bully the EU into scrapping quotas to Caribbean banana farmers so that Central American dollar bananas [so called because they're grown on US owned, pesticide-deluged plantations in Central America] can grab the ten percent of the market they don't monopolise already. The ACP is the group of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries which signed the Lomé Convention with the European Union. The Lomé Convention was a trade and aid agreement that the European Union (EU) first signed in 1975 with 48 of its ex-colonies. The Convention's preferential trade arrangements permitted duty-free access for a range of commodities on which the economies of the ACP are extremely dependent. From July 1993 until February 2000, a dozen ACP countries which traditionally exported bananas to the EU market benefited from duty-free access to the EU market under the so-called 'Banana Protocol' of the Lomé Convention. In June 2000, the EU and 77 ACP countries signed the Cotonou Agreement, which replaces Lomé. Traditional ACP banana exporting countries continued to have duty-free access for their bananas.
The main 'traditional' ACP banana exporting countries are:
Ivory Coast,
Cameroon,
St Lucia,
Jamaica,
Belize,
St Vincent and the Grenadines,
Dominica,
Suriname,
Somalia,
Grenada and Cape Verde.
More recently the Dominican Republic joined the ACP and Ghana started exporting bananas for the first time. Both are regarded by the EU as 'non-traditional' banana exporters. Bananas in St Lucia, St Vincent, Dominica, Grenada (the Windward Islands) and some parts of Jamaica are produced on small farms in hilly areas, usually owned and worked by local family farmers. The small plots often lie on steep and difficult terrain, unsuited to other crops. This style of farming is becoming less and less economically viable, as small farmers have to compete with the profitable large-scale farming methods adopted by many of the dollar producers. In the Windward Islands bananas provide over half of all export earnings. This dependence goes back to the early 1950s, when the islands were British colonies.
Bananas are the fourth most important staple crop in the world, critical for food security in many tropical countries. World banana production amounts to some 65 million tonnes per year concentrated in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America because of the climatic conditions. More than 85 countries produce bananas and plantains, but for at least 15 Latin American and Caribbean producer countries, the Cavendish variety of banana is a crucial source of export income.
Several million people depend on the banana trade for their livelihood. About 20% of the 65 million tonnes of bananas produced each year enter world trade; in fact Brazil and India, the two biggest banana producing countries, are hardly involved in the international banana trade at all. The highest consumption per person is in Uganda, where bananas are produced solely for local consumption. The crop is grown by millions of small-scale farmers in Africa, South Asia and Northern Latin America for household consumption and or/local markets. Most of this production is achieved with few or no external inputs [pesticides etc.]. However, once a producer grows for the export markets of the industrialised world, considerable and growing levels of external inputs are required to effectively compete in these markets.
So buying Caribbean bananas ensures you are eating organic and fair trade bananas [even if they aren't labeled as such]; they may be a bit smaller, but they aren't drenched in pesticides and they haven't left miles of plastic sheeting lying about in the environment as the vast dollar banana plantations do, and the workers who grow and pick them, aren't dying young from pesticide poisoning.
