For
America, the issue is US firms' stake in the global economy. For
Europe, it's partly a moral debt to people they enslaved. And
for islanders, it's a humbling quest for a place in the sun. On a farm just south of Castries, Gajadhar's eyes sparkle and his voice softens as he speaks of bananas, his rough hands tenderly examining a leafy tree.
"Bananas are my life, and bananas are the region's lifeblood," says the silver-bearded owner of 16 acres (6 1/2 hectares).
Gajadhar, 52, believes Caribbean bananas are the best - "a sweeter, better tasting fruit" than those grown by US giants like Chiquita Brands and Dole Food in Latin America. But he admits to some problems. Substandard storage and transport make quality inconsistent. Absence of irrigation suppresses yield much of the year. And crop-obliterating hurricanes make supply forecasts unreliable.
Bananas were introduced by British colonisers and developed after independence because they grow year-round and boast the high yield-to-land ratio important to tiny territories.
Bananas - and more recently, tourism - are credited for somewhat improved living standards. But the per capita income on many islands remains low - about US$3,000 a year in St. Lucia - and these economies are dangerously dependent on one crop.
In the Windward Islands, the southern half of the eastern Caribbean chain, about a third of the labour force works in bananas, providing 35 percent of export earnings. Bananas are also key to larger Caribbean countries like Jamaica.
The vast majority of the region's crop - a mere one percent of the world's production - goes to Europe. There, it's long been protected and now accounts for almost a tenth of the EU's banana imports.
A scheme established in 1993 gives preference in licensing to those who import bananas from former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific, and imposes tariffs on bananas from elsewhere. This is seen by many in the Caribbean as an obligation to former colonies populated by descendants of Africans whom the Europeans enslaved.
"The Europeans recognise their moral obligation. They have a conscience," said Gajadhar. "The Americans don't."
In what's being called the "banana war," American officials have charged that the preferences are unfair to US companies that grow bananas in Central America, cost consumers billions, and are illegal and inefficient.
"It's an ideal world (the Caribbean) had over many years, and everybody would want to live in that kind of thing," said D. Brent Hardt, chief of the political and economic section at the US Embassy in Barbados. "But it has stymied growth in what had once been a rapidly growing market."