Posted on 09/10/2001 7:37:11 PM PDT by blam
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 11 2001
Libya woos Britain's banana islands
BY MICHAEL BINYON AND DAVID ADAMS IN MIAMI
THE Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, is offering to buy all the bananas produced by three former British colonies in the Caribbean. His proposal exploits the desperate predicament in which the islands have found themselves after Britain lost a decade-long battle to protect their banana industries from outside competition. Colonel Gaddafi claims that the deal will allow the islands to break free from what he described as the economic stranglehold imposed by the European Union and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
For decades St Vincent, Grenada and Dominica had sold most of their crop to Britain at prices higher than the world market. The system was set up in the late 1940s to create jobs on the islands and to provide British families, starved of exotic fruits during the Second World War, with bananas. Now the islands face bankruptcy because the United States has forced Britain and other European countries to open up to cheaper imports from Central America.
Colonel Gaddafi made the offer last week during a visit to Tripoli by the Prime Ministers of the three islands. Libya will pay more than the world price for the islands’ banana crop, their main export.
The controversial deal links islands that have strong political and family ties with Britain to a country that has long funded the IRA and other anti-Western terrorist organisations.
The $21 million (£14.4 milllion) aid package promised by Libya has alarmed Britain and the United States and threatens to give Colonel Gaddafi a vital political toehold in America’s backyard.
The Libyans, who are on the American list of countries backing terrorism, were accused of backing black Muslim insurgents who tried to overthrow the Government in Trinidad and Tobago ten years ago. They are also backing Islamic insurgencies in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world.
Libya’s aid package to countries closely linked to Britain includes help to Grenada to pay off a $6 million construction loan for its international airport, which was used by the US Marines during the American invasion in 1983 to suppress a proLibyan regime brought to power in a coup.
The three Caribbean leaders insist that their deal with Libya is not an anti-American position but was dictated by their need for money and investment. “We have very strong relations with the US,” Ralph Gonsalves, St Vincent’s Prime Minister, said. “Those relations have not been jeopardised and will not be jeopardised.”
Other members of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States were due to visit Tripoli to join in celebrations making the anniversary of the 1969 revolution that brought Colonel Gaddafi to power, but the leaders of St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis and Antigua pulled out to avoid annoying Washington.
A Libyan delegation is due in the Caribbean this month to complete the deal. It was unclear yesterday whether Libya would import the islands’ entire banana crop or make up the difference between their export price and the lower prices of the American-owned banana companies running industrial-sized plantations in Central and South America.
Britain fought a long battle to stop the cheaper bananas flooding the European market as a way of protecting the fragile economies of former British and French colonies in the Caribbean, but after a long and bitter trade dispute that led to American threats of retaliatory import duties on European products, the EU was forced to back down in the wake of a ruling by the WTO.
The islands have been forced to cut their banana plantations and have tried to diversify their economies through offshore banking and financial services, but this is under threat from international regulation. Europe and the US are concerned about money-laundering, tax evasion and, in the case of the US, illegal offshore gambling. America and Britain have sharply cut development aid to the Caribbean in recent years.
Britain re-established relations with Libya only last year, after the break that followed the shooting from the Libyan mission in London of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and Colonel Gaddafi’s long refusal to extradite the Lockerbie suspects for trial overseas.
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