The European Union is under increasing pressure to delay revising its banana import regime as the only way to avoid reigniting the bitter "banana wars" of the 1990s, Caribbean producers said yesterday.
Tensions are running high in the negotiations over a single entry tariff for the fruit, to replace the EU's complex tiered system of quotas and duties.
The problem is over the level of tariff - and the differences of opinion are causing difficulties.
The EU pledged to move to a tariff-only regime by 2006 after it lost a World Trade Organisation (WTO) dispute brought by the United States and Ecuador, the world's largest banana exporter, who complained EU policy discriminated against them.
Some of Europe's former colonies in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries are demanding a high tariff to prevent cheaper Latin American fruit from flooding the EU's lucrative markets where ACP fruit now enters duty free.
The Latin Americans, on the other hand, insist on a tariff no more than the EU's current base rate of 75 euros a tonne.
The result of all this mean some suppliers are now suggesting it would be better to not touch the existing policy or risk sliding into “Banana Wars Two”, which could be the likely consequence of change.
"The alternative has been so terrible that countries have been proposing the unthinkable," Edwin Laurent, special banana envoy for the Windward Islands-Dominica, St Lucia, Grenada and St Vincent-in the eastern Caribbean told Reuters.
"For the first time, we are not necessarily on opposite sides since there is a common objective on which we can all agree," he told members of the European Parliament.
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