Drug Exports 'To Rise' If Bananas Halted
By Frank Jack Daniel

Drug production and emigration to industrialized countries will increase if Europe does not keep its doors open to Latin American bananas, the president of Costa Rica has warned.

Latin America's fragile democracies and economies would be threatened without better market access for tropical products such as bananas, President Abel Pacheco said.

"If Latin American bananas are removed from European markets via discriminatory tariff policies, sooner or later we will have to export human beings displaced from their home countries for social and economic reasons," Pacheco said.

"Sooner or later, the land today used for legal products could be dedicated to the production of the plant bases of illicit drugs."

Pacheco was speaking at the inauguration of a gathering of presidents from top Latin American banana-exporting nations, including Ecuador and Colombia, meeting to finalize plans to force Europe to open its markets to Latin American-grown bananas.

In the 1990s, after losing a bitter 'banana war', Europe agreed to replace a complex system of quotas and import duties with a tariff-only system by January 2006.

The seven-nation export block says a 230 euro ($370) per tonne tariff proposed by the European Commission is far too high and will reduce their access to European, with dire social and economic side-effects.

About 300,000 people are employed by the banana industry within the export block, according to the Costa Rican export group Corbana, and together the seven nations are responsible for 75 per cent of world banana exports.

If a lower tariff is not agreed beforehand, Costa Rica says it is prepared to use the banana issue as a blocking tactic at a key World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting at the Doha round of trade talks planned for Hong Kong in December.

"We find it worrying that, in its concern to preserve discriminatory commercial treatment, the European Commission is complicating multilateral trade talks," the countries said in a joint statement.

The conflict pits the Latin Americans against a group of Europe's former African, Caribbean and Pacific colonies, known as ACP, whose bananas enter EU markets free of duty.

Europe already receives the majority of its bananas from Latin America.

The WTO is due to rule by August 1 whether the duty of 230 euros per tonne will preserve access to EU markets, but many experts expect at least a second round of arbitration before the two sides can agree.

Mr Pacheco said legal trade rather than handouts would help to reduce the dependence of countries such as Colombia on drug exports.

"The best expression of aid that the developed countries can and should make is not charity – it is to let our countries participate in the international markets with security and planning," he said.

Migration from Latin America to the US and Europe increased enormously during the past 15 years against a background of economic crises.

Hundreds of thousands of people have emigrated from the world's No.1 banana exporter, Ecuador, since a 1999 economic slump, due in part to damage to banana plantations by El Nino related weather phenomenon.

A third of all world banana exports come from Ecuador.