WHAT BANANA TRADE MEANS TO ECUADOR

Letter to the editor from Ambassador of Ecuador in London. By sheer hard work Ecuador has achieved the position of the world's largest exporter. We have neither asked for nor received favours from any banana-importing country. And yet, from January 1 1999, our access possibilities into the EU, our most important market, where we have to pay a duty of roughly 20 per cent, have been cut by 11 per cent. We have also had to pay out some 49m annually to buy EU import licences in order to claw back the access we had before the EU regime was introduced in 1993. It was Ecuador that asked the original World Trade Organisation Panel to rule on whether the EU's so-called revised regime is compatible with international trade rules. We did this in the interest of our own beleaguered economy, not because we had a quarrel with the Caribbean. What lies at the heart of the EU/ US trade dispute is the commercial interest of these superpowers. The interest of the developing countries where bananas are grown have been totally obscured.