Caribbean officials yesterday criticised a World Trade Organisation ruling against a new EU tariff on imported bananas, saying the move could squeeze regional producers out of a market vital to their fragile economies. A WTO arbitration body yesterday ruled the tariff is illegal, siding with nine Latin American countries that said raising th tariff would severely hurt their economies. Julius Timothy, a former finance minister in the tiny island of Dominica, called the ruling a possible “death knell” for Caribbean banana producers, who had pushed for the tariff to protect them from losing business to larger Latin American plantations. “The European market will be flooded with cheap bananas against which we will not be able to compete,” Timothy said. Guyana Foreign Trade Minister Clement Rohee, a spokesman for the 15-member Caribbean Community on WTO relations, called the ruling “a terrible blow” to Caribbean countries already facing deep cuts in EU subsidies for sugar producers. “It would only compound the problems with sugar ... and money we have to find to deal with security,” Rohee said. Most Caribbean bananas are produced in Jamaica, Suriname, and four Windward Islands – Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, and St Vincent. Except for Suriname, they are grown on small farms, often in hilly areas. Bananas make up almost half of export revenues in the Windward Islands, where production and transport prices are almost two times higher than in Latin America, where they are grown on large plantations with relatively low labour costs. Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson said his government is “actively examining what are the implications of the ruling” and said he’s already taken unspecified diplomatic action “to insulate ourselves as far as we can from any adverse affects” from the decision. Because their bananas are relatively expensive, Caribbean producers had pushed for a tariff 333 dollars er ton, in order to level the playing field. Under the current quota system, Latin American countries can export up to 2.7 million tons of bananas a year at a tariff rate of 91 dollars per ton. Any more is subject to a 825 dollars per ton tariff. EU officials say Latin American bananas currently have around 60% of the market, while African and Caribbean producers have 20%. Bananas grown in the EU - mostly on Spanish and French islands – account for another 20%. Reprinted from sbpost.ie