Banana Wars: The Price of Free Trade: A Caribbean PerspectiveBananas 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. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
The Beginnings | 5 |
A Benevolent Empire II | 11 |
Copyright | |
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