A long-running row over bananas continued to fester Thursday as ministers from three dozen major players in the World Trade Organization (WTO) were seeking a breakthrough in the Doha Round of global trade talks in Geneva.
The dispute was centered on the European Union (EU) import rules on bananas, involving two groups of developing countries, namely the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and the Latin American nations.
In the past decades, ACP countries have been given duty-free access to the EU markets when it comes to a wide range of products, including bananas.
However, Latin American countries have not enjoyed the unilateral preferential treatment, and they alleged that the discriminatory practice has put their bananas at a disadvantage on the EU markets when competing with their ACP peers.
After successfully challenging the EU's banana import regime within the WTO framework several times, the Latin American countries now demand the EU's complete abandonment of the rule.
With hopes for resolving the dispute before the WTO ministerial talks, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy last week presented a compromise offer, under which Brussels would gradually reduce its import tariff on bananas to 116 euros per ton by 2015 from the current 176 euros.
It also contained a "peace clause", committing the Latin American countries to ending the legal challenges in exchange for lower tariffs.
Though EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson accepted the proposal, not everyone was happy with it.
Adopting a stand of either taking the proposal or leaving it, Mandelson had warned that if some others wanted to reject it, then they had to take the responsibility for the failure of the whole Doha Round talks.
