The Banana Wars

The Pitons rise out of the sea on the south-west coast of Saint Lucia as two volcanic spires, Gros Piton and Petit Piton, forested to the summit and dropping straight into deep water. They are on the flag, on the beer bottle, and on the UNESCO World Heritage list. They are also, from certain angles on the road above Soufrière, framed by terraces of banana plants — and those plants tell a story that changed the economics of the whole eastern Caribbean.

How an island came to grow one crop

Saint Lucia changed hands between Britain and France fourteen times, which is why the island has English as its official language, a French-based creole spoken by almost everyone, and place names in both. Sugar was the colonial crop, worked by enslaved Africans on plantations in the flatter coastal valleys.

Sugar declined through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as beet production and larger producers elsewhere undercut it. What replaced it, from the 1950s, was bananas — and the reason bananas worked was not agronomy but trade policy.

Britain, and later the European Community, gave preferential access to fruit from former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, formalised in the Lomé Conventions. Windward Islands bananas — from Saint Lucia, Dominica, Saint Vincent and Grenada — entered the European market on terms that Latin American fruit did not receive.

The economics of that preference were not marginal. Caribbean bananas are grown on small family plots on steep volcanic slopes, harvested by hand, and cost substantially more to produce than fruit grown on flat industrial plantations in Central and South America. Without the preference they were never going to compete on price. With it, they became the backbone of the Saint Lucian rural economy — at the peak, bananas accounted for a very large share of export earnings and supported thousands of smallholder families, who were called, without irony, green gold farmers.

The longest trade dispute in history

In 1993 the European Union consolidated its national banana regimes into a single market arrangement that maintained ACP preferences. The United States — where Chiquita and Dole, both major growers in Latin America, were headquartered — challenged it, joined by Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.

What followed ran through the GATT and then the newly created World Trade Organization for the better part of two decades, and is generally described as the longest-running trade dispute in the history of the multilateral system. The WTO ruled against the EU regime repeatedly. The United States imposed retaliatory tariffs on unrelated European goods — famously including cashmere, handbags and Scottish cheese — to force compliance.

The case is also remembered for its political dimension: Chiquita’s chief executive was a major donor to US political campaigns, and the timing of the US government’s decision to take up the case was the subject of considerable comment at the time.

A settlement was finally reached in the Geneva Agreement of 2009, phasing down the tariff on Latin American fruit and effectively ending the preferential margin. The EU provided transitional support for ACP producers.

Two of the largest economies on earth spent twenty years litigating over the shelf price of fruit, and the countries that lost were islands with populations smaller than a European suburb.

What it did to the islands

The effect on the Windwards was severe and rapid. Banana production in Saint Lucia fell by a very large margin from its peak; the number of registered growers collapsed from tens of thousands across the islands to a fraction of that. Dominica’s banana sector all but disappeared. Rural incomes fell, and emigration and urban drift accelerated.

The islands had, on the whole, not diversified during the good years — which is the criticism most often made, generally by people who were not farming a steep hillside at the time — and the transition to tourism has been uneven. Saint Lucia managed it better than most, because it had the Pitons, deepwater harbours for cruise ships and an established hotel sector. Dominica, without beaches, could not follow the same route and went for nature tourism at much smaller scale.

What survives in Saint Lucian bananas is a niche: Fairtrade certification, which restored a price premium for growers who organised into certified groups, and which now covers a substantial share of what the Windwards still export. The Fairtrade banana in a British supermarket is, quite often, literally this story.

Two Nobel laureates

Saint Lucia has a population of under two hundred thousand and has produced two Nobel laureates, which gives it, per head, the highest rate of any sovereign country in the world. It is a statistic Saint Lucians deploy quickly and are entitled to.

Sir Arthur Lewis won the economics prize in 1979 for work on development in economies with surplus labour — the Lewis model of a traditional agricultural sector and a modern industrial one, and the transfer of workers between them. It is difficult to read that work without noticing that the man who wrote it grew up on an island whose economy consisted of one crop and whose surplus labour emigrated.

Derek Walcott won the literature prize in 1992. His work took the Caribbean’s inheritance — the languages, the sea, the ruins, the mixed ancestry — and refused to treat any of it as derivative. Omeros transposed Homer onto Saint Lucian fishermen without irony or apology, which was the point: this place has an epic and it is not a footnote to somebody else’s.

Walcott also wrote about the specific difficulty of being a writer from a small island whose principal export at the time was fruit and whose principal international presence was a beach in a brochure. That tension is entirely legible in the country today, and it is why Derek Walcott Square in Castries is worth twenty minutes rather than five.

The island you actually visit

Soufrière, under the Pitons, is where most of the interest is. The Sulphur Springs are marketed as a drive-in volcano, which is accurate in the sense that you can park inside the collapsed caldera of Soufrière volcano, among vents and boiling mud, and then bathe in the mineral-heavy hot springs downstream.

Gros Piton is climbed on a marked trail with a guide — a hard two hours up on steps and roots rather than a technical route, with the reward being the whole south of the island from 771 metres. Petit Piton is steeper, unmaintained, and generally discouraged.

The Pitons Management Area is the World Heritage site, and it includes the marine section: the reef between the two peaks drops off steeply and the diving and snorkelling directly off Anse Chastanet is among the most convenient good reef access in the Caribbean.

Inland, the rainforest reserve and the Edmund Forest Reserve trail cross the island’s spine, with the Saint Lucia parrot — the national bird, down to a handful of dozens in the 1970s and recovered through a conservation programme that is one of the region’s clearest successes — findable if you go early with a guide.

And on a Friday night, Gros Islet in the north holds the street party that has been running for decades: sound systems, barbecue drums, and a crowd that has always been more local than the resort strip five minutes away suggests. Order the fish, take the small change, and stay later than you planned.