Castries, St Lucia (AP) – Exports of bananas from this eastern Caribbean island fell to a record low in 2005 as more farmers left the industry because of increased competition and the region’s looming loss of preferential treatment in the key European market, officials said yesterday.

St Lucia exported 30,970 tons (28,096 metric tons) of the fruit, a 28 per cent decline from 2005, according to the Windward Islands Banana Development and Exporting Company.

The regional banana organisation’s technical services director, Dr Errol Reid, said the main factor in the decrease was economic uncertainty as the European Union, under pressure from the World Trade Organisation, devises new tariffs that will be less preferential to Caribbean and African banana producers.

Reid said bad weather and leafspot disease also contributed to the drop in production.

Exports hit a high of 133,777 tons (121,360 metric tons) in 1990 and have been dropping ever since. There are now fewer than 2,000 banana farmers in the country compared to more than 10,000 in the early 1990s, he said.

The European Union’s system of tariffs and quotas had favoured former colonies in the Caribbean and Africa over large-scale growers in Latin America, who successfully argued to the WTO that the arrangement was unfair. Negotiators are now trying to work out a new system.