Why the UK and EU are fighting over bananas

The cost of bananas, which has not gone up at all in the UK in the last three decades, could now be about to fall in a controversial move made possible by Brexit.

The banana is "one of the few British supermarket staples to have bucked the trend during the cost of living crisis", said The Guardian. In fact, the price today, around 115p per kilo, is the same as it was in 1990.

The UK's banana market is dominated by the "dollar banana" producers of Latin America, who can sell their product cheaply due to rolled-over European Union-negotiated free trade deals that have significantly reduced import taxes.

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In 2019, the EU promised not to cut tariffs imposed on big producers any further "in recognition of the impact on the smaller African competitors". But the UK's exit from the European Union has "freed it from that pledge to the world's poorest", said the paper.

The latest

As part of its trade deal with Andean countries – Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru – the UK government is currently conducting a review of banana tariffs. 

Afruibana, the Pan-African association of banana producers and exporters, has said the move to diverge from the EU commitment would amount to a "betrayal" by the UK. 

While it means that banana prices are likely to come down even further in UK supermarkets, it will come "at the cost of the livelihoods of thousands of workers on small plantations in some of Africa's poorest countries", said The Guardian, with potentially severe consequences for businesses in Ghana, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast. 

In the past year, the UK has granted tariff concessions on bananas to Mexico and Peru as it joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Another trade agreement with Australia aims to eliminate all tariffs within eight years.

The background

The UK's burgeoning banana habit has been bad news for growers for some time. When confronted by discount supermarkets such as Aldi and Lidl in the mid-1990s, Tesco, Asda and other major supermarkets "slashed the price of bananas to entice customers", said The Times.

“All major retailers except the Co-op have been selling loose bananas at unsustainably low prices, preventing any investment in social and environmental improvements by producers,” Alistair Smith, founder of Banana Link, a campaign group that champions sustainability, told the paper.

To keep prices low, bananas are grown on huge monoculture plantations, which are more susceptible to diseases such as TR4 that are "slowly destroying swathes of plantations in Asia", said The Times,

“It is the Irish potato famine phenomenon all over again," said Smith. "You could potentially get global wipeout, as there's no diversity to stop the disease taking hold." Supermarkets need to look at "alternative ways of producing on a commercial scale before it's too late", he said. 

Bananas became a symbol of excessive EU red tape during the Brexit debate after The Sun newspaper brought to light obscure EU legislation stating that bananas must be "free from malformation or abnormal curvature".

In the British media and the public imagination, the rule appeared to suggest that the EU had banned bananas that were too "bendy". Indeed, according to an Ipsos-Mori poll taken in June 2016, before the Brexit vote, 24% of British people thought bananas that are "too bendy" were banned from being imported into the UK.