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.