Making a Better Banana Farmer: Restructuring the West Indian Banana Industry

Abstract

The banana industry in the four Wind-ward Islands, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, is the focus of a comprehensive restructuring process. This process is being fuelled by the fears shared by these islands' governments and organizations involved in the production, marketing and selling of Windward Islands' bananas on the European market, that the industry, as it is currently organized, is not competitive. The issue of competitiveness arises because in the first place the preferential access to the EU market which they currently enjoy is likely to end in the year 2002 and, even before then, key aspects of the EU's banana protocol were ruled by the WTO Panel and Appellate Body in September 1997, to be in contravention of WTO rules.