5 - Economic dependency

Summary

I'll tell you what, brother. If we lose our outside market, then we're gonna have to suck an awful lotta cane.

Trinidadian sugar cane farmer, 1971

If you were to say “1992” to a resident of the eastern Caribbean's Windward Islands (Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada), the reaction would almost certainly have nothing to do with the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's epic voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Rather, the peoples of the Windwards associate 1992 with their immediate economic circumstances. That is the year for which full economic integration of the European Community (EC) is scheduled. Accordingly, the EC's imminent economic coalescence, as far as Windward islanders are concerned, throws open to serious question the existing economic agreements that, since mid-twentieth century, have allowed bananas from the Windward Caribbean to enter Britain under preferential market conditions (Thomson 1987).

On the eve of the 1992 changes for the EC, bananas from the Windwards are not assessed import duties upon entering the British market. They are further protected by a limitation that the United Kingdom has imposed on so-called “dollar” bananas from Central and South America. Although Windward islanders are by no means wealthy, they have prospered in a relative sense because of these special trade arrangements. During a recent period when most world commodity prices were slumping, banana exports from Jamaica and the Windwards increased five-fold, from US $39 million in 1977 to US $195 million in 1986 (Elliott 1988: 10).