I admit to a degree of sadness reading the article in FPJ last week recording the news that Jamaica Producers has decided to quit banana exports to the UK after a century-plus of dealing with this country.

Most people have seen the grainy film of the first fruit being distributed to children after the Second World War. I just about remember that far back, but I became directly involved as a student back in the 1950s, when as a holiday job I helped make rubber bananas for point-of-sale material, which were provided to independent retailers to hang outside their shops in cold weather, as the real product quickly turned black under such conditions.

Even then there was strict quality control, as I had to spray the requisite number of brown streaks on each hand to make the props appear even more lifelike!

Several years later, I had the good fortune to visit this Caribbean island several times and, even if I never actually heard the Banana Boat Song, it was a vibrant industry with the confidence to grow fruit on patches of land it claimed were more mountainous than Switzerland, with the bold predictions that it could reach an export figure of 100,000 tonnes a year.

But despite being fenced by a complex licensing arrangement that protected the British Caribbean as a whole, there were always whispers of the feared EU banana regime. A free market, it was screamed, would open up the many competitive areas with cheaper production costs dominated by the US banana barons.

And to its credit, in those days Jamaica was in the forefront of defending its market more than eloquently to the British government and the European Community.

Apart from the economic defence that increased competition would bring great hardship, Jamaica also convinced many a buyer that its smaller fruit tasted better than anything larger grown on the vast, flat irrigated plains of Central and South America.

There were also always hopes that alternative crops could be found. Surprisingly, they were not always exclusively stuck on the most obvious tropical fruit, such as pineapples, or even established niche markets for trademarked ortaniques or ugli fruit.

I remember getting involved in a radio broadcast that discussed high hopes for Jamaica’s carrots, which was going swimmingly until it was realised that the peak of the season in November clashed mightily with East Anglia. At one point, there was also what was regarded as an invasion from Israel, and Jamaica began to grow crops such as melons and tomatoes, and bred carp to be shipped up to the large Jewish community in Florida.

Then, of course, there was always the weather; not just the occasional blow down, which wreaked havoc, but at the opposite end of the scale, the constant need for sufficient rainfall to allow fruit to grow well in the first place.

What will be poignant when the history of the Jamaican crop is written, is that the experts will probably decide that, despite more than a century of skill and service, the industry’s demise was simply all down to climate change.

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