WINFRESH: St. Lucia’s banana exports in critical and urgent need of help

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ver the last 25 years there have been many changes in the world banana market. Winfresh says that these have brought about major adjustments by exporters while new and emerging suppliers have entered the trade, displacing some traditional suppliers, particularly high cost producers from the Caribbean. Some have lost market share while others have gone completely out of the export market. In the Caribbean, Grenada, Dominica, St Vincent and Jamaica have all discontinued exporting bananas to the UK, leaving Saint Lucia as the only survivor, supplying a mere fraction of what it did in the early 1990s. The exceptions are the French territories which are heavily subsidized, as well as Belize and Suriname, which are large scale producers of the Latin American types.

In the case of Saint Lucia, which was the largest exporter of bananas in the English-speaking Caribbean, Winfresh says that efforts to restore production to a sustainable level have failed due largely to an unstable environment and poor coordination of production. 

The industry was undermined by instability in the mid 1990s which saw the emergence of numerous banana companies resulting in the duplication and fragmentation of management at a point in time when prices in the UK were declining very sharply.

When the energies of industry administrators, government and farmers should have been spent on repositioning the industry to face the new realities of a deregulated market, they were regrettably spent on the distractions generated by the internal in-fighting among the players who relentlessly jockeyed for leadership positions in the industry. All the while, the need to restructure and reposition was completely ignored while production declined and the industry was gradually disappearing on the market.

Source: Winfresh