The regimes of banana
Bananas represent one of the most widely traded agricultural goods in the world with annual export valued at five billion dollars. Though bananas are typically seen as an undifferentiated commodity, historically divergent patterns of trade regulation have defined two distinct commodity systems for this fruit: the dominant dollar Banana system centered on the U.S market and the smaller Banana trade between Europe and its former African, Caribbean and Pacific colonies.
The banana trade has historically been forged through global and local forces that simultaneously connect and divide major Latin American and Caribbean sites of production and major North American and European sites of consumption. In recent decades there have been two regimes regulating the trade in bananas: Dollar Bananas have been regulated by free market conditions shaped by oligopolistic power of key transnational corporations, while African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) have been regulated by preferential market agreement between nations. The conflict between ACP and Dollar Banana regimes – or Banana Wars – illuminates historical tensions between these two systems and the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as the new arbiter of the global market.
The regimes of banana
