The Banana: Empires, Trade Wars, and Globalization

10. Pursuit of an Elusive Goal

The foreign debt crisis that affected s during the s stimulated globalization processes in the primary sectors of many Latin American and Caribbean countries. The need to service debts and qualify for new loans created an export imperative that led such countries to expand their commodities sectors as a means of generating foreign exchange. This dynamic coincided with greater application of free-trade principles to agriculture and the imposition of structural adjustment policies by foreign aid agencies and international lending institutions. As agriculture was forced to expand onto more marginal lands, the results were often harmful to local food production and to the environment. In response to the export imperative, many countries looked for ways to diversify their economies. Some developed nontraditional agricultural exports ( s); others expanded production in traditional export sectors. Thrupp ( ) analyzed the growth of s in Latin America, linking it to technological change and the penetration of s into agricultural sectors. The strategy seemed '& Fkhik_j
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=eWb | Globalization like a sound way to reduce dependence on the narrow range of traditional exports that were often subjected to fluctuating market prices, but in the long run the strategy was fraught with uncertainty. According to Thrupp, as more indebted states entered the fray, the competition among them increased, and the situation that already existed in traditional export sectors was replicated. Furthermore, the trend was an example of how economies were once again being structured to serve the needs of the North. Adding to the risk of this strategy was the fact that one country’s might be another ’s major traditional crop, a potential problem where bananas were involved. countries with uncompetitive banana industries could face competition from large-scale producers like Brazil and South Africa, which previously had not marketed bananas in Europe. The need to be competitive was perhaps never greater. As protective policies in agriculture were dismantled and trade preferences expired, pressure mounted on noncorporate farmers in the s to increase productivity, efficiency, and quality. Since the late s, banana farmers in states had been subjected to continual EU criticism of the poor quality and high cost of their fruit. The origins of this criticism date back to Hurricane David ( ), when cheaper Latin American bananas replaced lost eastern Caribbean exports in the UK and French markets. The cause of the criticism about quality is not always clear. Many European consumers prefer the smaller bananas coming from the Caribbean. Although their appearance may not measure up to Latin American standards, they are sweeter and their taste is often viewed favorably. Nevertheless, the s conveyed EU criticisms of Caribbean bananas to their farmers, who often interpreted them as the cause of the higher quality standards they were forced to fulfill. The imposition of those standards transferred more of the post-harvest handling process of bananas to the farmers themselves, adding to their workload while increasing their costs and providing less remuneration. Welch ( , ) questions the relationship between quality and efficiency with regard to eastern Caribbean banana production. She Pursuit of an Elusive Goal | suggests that increased efficiency was achieved during the s, when smaller, less productive farmers were driven out of the industry . The cost of sustaining so many small producers was real; she notes that St. Lucia’s thirteen inland buying stations and six input stores primarily benefited the smaller producers, who also held about percent of the ’s outstanding debt. But would the elimination of those producers yield quality improvements? There is nothing to suggest that it would, and officials in Dominica, Grenada, and St. Lucia uniformly lamented the decline in the number of banana farmers that occurred during the s. ;b[c[dji
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9ecf[j_j_l[d[ii What is competitiveness and why is it increasingly valued in the world economy? Theoretically, competitiveness is the efficient use of resources, both human and natural, in ways that should yield less expensive products, making them accessible to greater percentages of the population. The concept is related to comparative advantage theory, the classical economic trade theory suggesting that everyone benefits when each country or region focuses on production of those goods for which its resources are best suited, leading to efficient production in terms of cost. Efficient production contributes to increased trade, with countries selling the goods that they produce most efficiently and importing goods that their resources are not well suited to produce...