Banana Plantations Facing with License Problems

The banana plantations in Ghana, who are exporting to the EU countries, are facing with a EU licensing problem regarding the length and size of the bananas.

Banana Plantations Facing with License Problems Male: The cheap imports are the only challenge. Next stop, a banana plantation in the central lakes region of Ghana. Augustine: Where did this come from? Male: From the plantation. Augustine: From the plantation. Male: Yes. Augustine: Then the selection process begins. Male: Both the river estates export to the EU to Europe. Their problem, trying to comply with the EU’s licensing rules. Augustine: Alex you have quite a good set up here and you export to Europe. Have you had in a problem exporting to Europe? Alex: Indeed there is. We still have to overcome this European Union license system on banana. Augustine: Can you explain that further? What is this licensing system? Alex: Well, you know that I'm not a technical mind. But, what it means to me as a farmer is that we’re not able to get our export into the market. Host: Washing the crop is easy enough. So he's spraying it with chemical preservatives. What's harder is meeting EU licensing requirements like length and weight. That means using lots of chemical fertilizers, expensive and not the kind of farming they like around here. Alex: I think that’s the idea of length and sizes in bananas are this is addressing of the actual matter because to make your bananas grow big in size and in length, all that you have to do is to dump a lot of chemical fertilizer and in this couple of months, we have your big sizes and then your length. But we talk about fair trade and fair trade has to deal with the environment. And therefore, much -- growing phase is what comes into mind. We think about consumer choice, so we as a fair trade company. We believe that we have to grow our bananas in a more sustainable way. Male: So in the future, they’d like to go organic if consumers will pay. Meantime, licensing rules and ever changing quotas constitute for Augustine a serious non-tariff barrier. Not exactly a tax, but still a restriction on trade. Augustine: For somebody like me who is in trade advocacy that appears to be another barrier to trade. They are closing the doors on us. They are opening the doors with one hand. The same, we are doing our average quotas, we are moving or reducing access import due to these tariffs and so on. With the other hand, they are closing the door by bringing in quality requirements that are far beyond the capacity of local producers especially the small scale producers. Here, I wouldn’t buy a banana using a tape to measure. The following is -- it hasn’t got a tape to be measuring. But if that’s what Europe is requiring, then Europe has to make an effort to help us to understand them and help us to be able to develop our capacity after the level that would be able to meet us halfway. But Ghana is still largely, ever will an agricultural-based economy. About 70% of our people and they are living in agriculture activity and part of this, the more pain part of agricultural activity is that which is committed exports. So it passes result of the increasing quality requirement by Europe, we’ll lose out on our agricultural exports. And what it means that those who are currently engaged in agriculture exports are going to lose their jobs.