How much does it matter to you where your bananas come from, and can you detect any difference in the fruit?
Most of us responsible global citizens like to think we consider factors such as fair trade when we make purchasing decisions. But how much attention do you pay to where the bananas you're buying were grown? Yesterday the EU finally ratified reduced tariffs on South American imports, making it likely that we'll be seeing more of their bananas and fewer from the Caribbean and Africa, as well as a possible reduction in price.
Yet again the banana finds itself the unlikely fulcrum of the debate about how we produce, sell and buy food. For the last two decades the importance of the fruit as a mainstay of post-colonial economies has grown; trade blocs have repeatedly clashed over it; and a fair trade movement has emerged around it, redefining the relationship between producers and their customers.
The agreement ratified yesterday is the culmination of a complaint brought to the WTO by Ecuador in 1996. The charge, upheld in 2008 was that the EU was breaking global trade rules by favouring bananas imported from former African and the Caribbean colonies of some member states. The wholesale price of South American bananas will begin to come down as the import tariff is reduced, and some experts say this will result in reduced prices for consumers, too. But the question is, what do we lose if we pay even less for bananas?
We're already enjoying some suspiciously cheap fruit in the UK. The tariff agreement comes on top of two recent supermarket price wars, one in 2002 when Asda/Walmart struck a deal with Del Monte creating a lasting depression in prices, and another which began in 2007.
Of course, it's the huge scale of the supermarkets and the large producers (Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte, all South American producers, control more than 60% of production between them in a market worth about $25bn annually) that makes this sort of behaviour possible. Yet again, among the biggest losers are likely to be the associations of smallholders who produce the majority of Caribbean bananas, some of whom are yet to fully recover from hurricane Tomas which ravaged the Windward Islands only three months ago.
This isn't to say that the big companies are all bad, or that they're not trying to improve the ways in which they do business. However, when Gabriel Stein, an expert on protectionism at Lombard Street Research, said on this morning's Today programme that this is good news for British consumers because prices would come down, we should perhaps pause to consider the implications for the smallholders who are the real losers in this dispute.
Stein also made the claim that "generally the Latin American bananas are supposed to be of better quality." I'm not sure bananas from one region are any better than another (the ones we eat in the UK all come from the same cultivar, Cavendish, and ultimately from the same plant, cloned thousands of times). But it will be a great shame if consumers who have to watch their budgets lose the choice of buying bananas from large corporations or associations of smallholders.
To what extent do global politics and economics affect which bananas you buy? And can you detect any difference in quality between regions?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/feb/04/banana-wars-winners-losers
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