Market Scene : Germany Slips on Bananas : It lost a fight with European Union over quotas but hasn’t given up hope.

A banana is not a banana is not a banana.

To Germans, there are big, beautiful, tasty Latin American bananas, and there are all other bananas--inferior fruit from anywhere but Latin America.

Among the world’s biggest banana enthusiasts, Germans put up a hard fight over the past year to prevent the European Union from setting quotas and tariffs on Latin American bananas in favor of those from the few banana-producing countries of southern Europe and from former tropical colonies of the French and British empires.

But they lost. The prices of the tariff-laden Latin bananas have skyrocketed and sales have plummeted. Now German importers and consumers are looking to the United States to reopen doors to Latin America’s luscious fruit. It was, after all, popularized in Germany by American GIs after World War II.

“We are paying for the old colonial burdens of Paris and London,” Ulrich Boysen, a spokesman for the Federal Council of German Fruit Traders, said of the high-priced bananas now coming into Europe. “We lost in the EU. Now we hope to have the support of the U.S. government.”

Their hopes are pinned in part on a trade action filed by an American firm, Chiquita Brands International of Cincinnati, which markets “dollar bananas,” as the Latin fruits are called because most of them are marketed by American corporations. Chiquita filed a complaint with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, which launched an investigation into the European Union’s banana import scheme in October.

Chiquita says its European sales have dropped 50% since the European import rules were imposed in 1993, and it has been joined in the complaint by the Hawaii Banana Industry Assn., which claims to be suffering from a glut of Latin American bananas on the U.S. market. They had been bound for Europe, but the tariff wall there sent them flooding to America instead and driving down prices for the domestic Hawaiian product, according to a Chiquita spokesman.

There was a time when European countries bought bananas where they pleased. France and Spain generally grew their own in Martinique, Guadeloupe and the Canary Islands; Britain and Portugal bought theirs from former colonies, while the Germans bought about 95% of theirs from Latin America, where the fruit was consistently sweet and cheap. The Germans had no tariffs on bananas.

But in 1993, national import rules were replaced by a general scheme for all of Europe as part of the region’s move toward a single market. The new rules give preferential access to “home-grown” fruit from EU countries and the former colonies of Britain and France in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, the so-called ACP areas, while placing a tariff on the Latin “dollar bananas.”

Despite the barrier, a majority of Europe’s bananas still come from Latin America, although in the teeth of a stepped tariff. The European banana regime allows 2 million tons of the Latin American product into the market each year, at a tariff of $122 a ton. Any imports above that face a tariff of $1,037 a ton.

The tariff gate is set aside for 643,000 tons from EU countries and 666,000 tons from ACP countries.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade treaty, yet to be implemented, permits slightly more Latin bananas to be imported by Europeans--2.1 million tons. In a special case for this year, the European Union allotment was increased to 2.17 million tons after Hurricane Debbie destroyed crops in the Windward Islands and French Antilles.

Meanwhile, the EU in Brussels redistributed import licenses, with about 66.5% reserved for traders who have done business in Latin American bananas, 30% for traders of EU and ACP bananas and 3.5% to newcomers.

In the scramble to acquire newcomers’ licenses, Germans applied in the names of their grandmothers, children and even dogs.

The EU Farm Commission argues that its tariff regime is a fair balance of the often competing interests of EU producers and consumers and of ACP and Latin American producers.

Germany and Chiquita--and possibly the U.S. government--disagree, saying the regime flies in the face of free trade.

“Plenty of people are upset by this whole thing,” said Joe Hagin, vice president of corporate affairs at Chiquita. “A lot of attention has been paid to German opposition, but the Benelux countries and Denmark are (also) opposed, and the Italians are less than enamored with the regulations.”

“The scheme,” added a U.S. trade official who declined to be identified, “is very, very damaging to these (Latin American) countries’ interests and to American interests. They (the EU) are trying to protect former colonies and promote marketing in certain European countries. Well, that is not what GATT is all about.”

If the U.S. government determines that the rules are discriminatory, various options are open, including taking the case to the World Trade Organization, which will succeed GATT next year.

The Germans challenged the market regime in the European Court of Justice, but lost their case when the court endorsed the EU rules in October.

Boysen, of the German fruit traders council, said German prices for bananas have gone up 40% to 50% in the last two years and, consequently, sales have dropped by 50% since 1992.

Bananas, which cost about 59 cents a pound in the United States, sell for between $1.06 and $1.21 a pound in Germany.