Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 14 • Number 21 • 9th June 2010
US, EU Ink Deal to End Banana Dispute
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The United States and the European Union have signed an agreement that should bring to a close their long-running dispute over trade in bananas, the Office of the US Trade Representative said on Tuesday. The announcement comes on the heels of a related pact that was signed by the EU and a group of Latin American countries last week.
Under the agreement that was signed in Geneva on Tuesday, the European Union pledged to implement a non-discriminatory, tariff-only regime for its banana imports. (The Office of the USTR has posted the text of the agreement here.)
“I am pleased that we, together with the Latin American banana-producing countries, have taken one more significant step toward ensuring that the EU’s bananas import regime is consistent with its WTO obligations,” said US Trade Representative Ron Kirk.
“All the parties still have some distance to travel before we finally and conclusively settle the bananas dispute,” he added. “However, we are closer now than we have ever been and I am hopeful that we will be able to finally lay this longstanding dispute to rest in the near future.”
The deal, which was initialled in Geneva in December of last year, serves as a complement to the Geneva Agreement on Trade in Bananas, the pact that was signed by the EU and a group of Latin American countries last week.
The spat over the EU’s banana tariffs - one of the oldest disputes in the history of the multilateral trading system - dates to the early 1990s, when Latin American countries began complaining to the WTO that the EU was treating their banana exports unfairly. Bananas from African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries - many of which are former European colonies - have long entered the European market duty free, while bananas from Latin American exporters have been slapped with import tariffs.
The United States soon joined the Latin Americans in their suits against Brussels. The US is not a major banana exporter, but several large banana companies - Chiquita, Del Monte and Dole - operate in Latin America but are headquartered in the US.
Once the EU has implemented the provisions of the deals that it has signed with the US and the Latin American countries, all of those suits will be dropped.
ICTSD reporting.
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End of a trade dispute but not of the social disputes.
Read the ITUC 2010 survey:
Illegal detention of MSICG representatives presenting damning report on multinationals: On 6 November 2009, Dora Baján, Blanca Villatoro, Cristina Ardón, María Reyes, Ingrid Ruano, Deysi Gonzales, Hortensia Gómez, Marielos Ruano, María Barrios and Etelvina Tojín went to the Labour Ministry to present a report on the labour rights violations suffered by women at the plantations supplying bananas to the multinationals Chiquita Brand and Del Monte Fresh. Staff and public servants at the Ministry proceeded to close the doors, leaving the ten women locked behind the railings surrounding the building. They then began to take photos and video films of them, firing verbal abuse at them, in a bid to intimidate them and prevent them from exercising their trade union and labour rights.
http://survey.ituc-csi.org/+-Guatemala-+...