d in 1997 to not be in compliance with 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 European market, where a long established system of trade protection allowed bananas to be sold at more than twice the price than in the U.S. More than half of the company’s revenues came from European sales. Just before the imposition of the trade barrier in 1993, Chiquita over-expanded and incurred too much debt as it bought more Central American plantations and built a refrigerated shipping fleet. Other companies were able to easily recover and adapt to the trade barrier. Both Dole and Del Monte recognized quickly that the restrictions would curb sales of Latin American bananas in Europe. They chose to diversify, expand into new markets and buy into African and Caribbean operations that gave them preferential access to the European market. Dole, specifically, took interests in Jamaica, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast, while at the same time buying up European...
