Costa Rica Expects EU Offer on
Bananas Next Month
Costa Rica expects the European Union to make a new offer on bananas
next month in an attempt to resolve the world's longest-running
trade dispute, Foreign Trade Minister Marco Vinicio Ruiz said on
Friday.
Settling the disagreement would end a decades-long dispute that has
poisoned relations among dozens of countries and remove an obstacle
to an overall deal in the World Trade Organization's Doha round to
free up global commerce.
It would also help foster trade ties between Europe and Latin
American countries grouped in the Central American Customs Union,
which is negotiating a trade deal with Brussels.
"It's been told (said) in this same week that the EU will make an
offer, will do something, in February," Ruiz said after arriving in
the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum following
talks in Brussels.
"I definitely believe that the EU wants to solve the problem," he
said.
Ruiz said officials from Ecuador, the world's biggest banana
exporter, had heard the same thing. He met officials from Ecuador
during his trip to Brussels.
Costa Rica is the coordinator at the WTO of the tropical products
countries, a group of mainly Latin American farm exporters.
The EU's banana import regime offers preferential access to its
markets for the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, a
large group of mainly poor developing countries that are mostly
former European colonies.
Under WTO pressure, Brussels has tried to reform the system, but the
Latin American countries say it is still unfair.
The two sides reached a deal on the sidelines of a meeting of
ministers last July seeking a breakthrough in the Doha talks.
But the ACP countries and the EU producers in the French Caribbean
and Spanish Canary Islands objected to the deal. When the July talks
collapsed, the EU walked away, saying it was linked to a Doha
agreement. |
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