Re: EU and Latin America lock horns over bananas
This battle will go on. The US-Monopoly (Chiquita, Dole & Del Monte) dominate a 75 % of all banana sales on the world. 18 % are Fyffes (Ireland/UK) and Noboa (EC). And the rest is ACP.
This solution of the EURO 230 /metric ton is a fair solution. Before this you needed import licenses. These were very rare. I treated to receive some of them. But the EU only gave them to companies and people that earlier bought licenses. So we were out, because the big companies didn't sell them. These times were the golden years of Chiquita.
Then came the EURO 230 solution. This was no discrimination. All in Ecuador thought, now it would be easier to export directly to Europe, a market with more/less 5.000.000 boxes 22XU weekly.
I remember well the discussions in Ecuador as we started to export to Europe. I had the contracts, the contacts, ... But the big Lion of the Monopoly awakes and always offered better prices to the farms and de buyers then we could.
150000 boxes with a deficit of USD 0.20 = USD 30000 is a much for a middle sized company. A big company that exports 1,000,000 boxes absorbs this and recovered this money later in less than a couple of days.
I remember a case (Not my company) where a new banana company (some small producers with less the 200 hectares of production and buying at a fair price from other farmers) shipped a full vessel (more than 100.000 boxes 22XU) to a country. The monopoly reacted by loading a vessel and sends it to the same port. The new company wanted to save money and contracted an older vessel running 11 knots. The monopoly sent one running 19 knots. Their vessel arrived some day earlier and the banana was sold. The market couldn't absorb the 2nd vessel and the new company entered into bankruptcy.
So I also was a victim of them. But they show me their strategy and so I am still planning in my banana future being a farmer when I will retire from today’s translation job.
|