Chiquita Bananas

7 Pages 1679 Words

the World Trade Organization (PR Newswire). The regime was designed in part to protect less efficient banana growers in former European colonies. Chiquita’s management has complained for years that the policies of the EU have cost the company millions by favoring banana’s from Caribbean producers in former European colonies.
The EU’s rules were judged to discriminate in favor of growers in EU territories and the Caribbean at the expense of Latin American producers and U.S. marketing firms (Croft). Britain and some other member nations of the EU still want continued protection for banana imports from African, Caribbean, and Pacific states, many of which are former colonies. Chiquita was the hardest hit from this import regime. They dropped from a forty percent market share to less than a twenty percent market share. Normally, this would not have totally destroyed a company, but in the case of Chiquita, it nearly did. Chiquita, more than any of its rivals, invested heavily in the 1980’s to exploit the Eu...