Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics by Cynthia Enloe

Author:Cynthia Enloe
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520279995
Publisher: University of California Press

WOMEN GROWERS AND THE “BANANA WARS”

The 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century was a time of “banana wars.” These international conflicts were waged without guns, but they were heated. A lot was at stake because so much depends on the banana. The rivals were global banana companies. The international dispute was over this question: could the European Union continue to impose hefty import tariffs on bananas shipped to Europe from Latin America for the sake of protecting the import of bananas grown in West Africa and the Caribbean?

Several narratives were being played out in these intense international banana wars. The Caribbean bananas were chiefly from the tiny Windward Islands Saint Vincent and Saint Lucia, while the West African bananas were from Senegal, Cameroon, and Côte d’Ivoire; bananas from both regions were grown by small farmers. By contrast, most of the Latin American bananas, on which the European Union commissioners wanted to impose stiff tariffs, were grown on large plantations.

The contest seemed to pit small growers against plantation behemoths: a fruity David versus a fruity Goliath. As in any mythic tale, however, complexity lies just below the surface. Dole, then the world’s largest banana company, had bought the French firm Compagnie Fruiti in 2009 to deliberately gain control of its West African smallholder-grown bananas and thus take advantage of the EU’s tariff regime.37

A further layer of meaning and interest shaped this global trade contest: the Windward and West African growers—and the local governments that benefited from favored access to the European banana market—were former British and French colonial subjects, to which trade officials in London and Paris continued to feel some paternalistic postcolonial obligation. The Latin American banana plantations, on the other hand, were owned by major U.S.-based corporations—Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte. Even though their bananas were Latin American, the corporations were seen by Washington officials as their own important domestic political allies.

A final layer in this war: in the current global political economy, the arena for this heavyweight banana contest was the World Trade Organization. The WTO was created by governments to negotiate settlements between competing trade-dependent governments in order to keep today’s neoliberal global economic gears turning smoothly, in particular to stave off escalating trade wars.

It took twenty years to resolve the banana war. In the end, the Latin American corporations and their Washington allies won. The Geneva-based WTO officials concluded that the EU’s tariffs and their rationale were protectionist. Protectionism is counter to the new global economic order. The head of the WTO, Pascal Lamy, declared the resolution a “truly historic moment.” The small growers in the Caribbean and West Africa were given several years to adjust to the newly unfettered global competition for European market share, but adjust they would have to.38 This suggests why Isabelle Lou Kouhelou, the market seller in Côte d’Ivoire, had her eye on both the WTO and her own potential neighboring markets. Market women’s calculations were close to the heart of the forced “adjustment.”

Beyond the market women—the local banana

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