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Bananas

My Lords, I am most grateful for being permitted to speak in the gap. I am in the happy position of being able to speak as the debate has been brought forward; the time originally envisaged for it would have made that impossible. I have listened with interest to the concerns expressed about the effects of the European Union regime on the producers of bananas. Having spoken up for the interests of Latin American producers in the past, and having spent a postgraduate year in Ecuador, I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, that the bananas produced there are great in variety and absolutely delicious. Noble Lords must go there and try them out on the spot. More recently, I visited St Lucia, Grenada and Antigua under the auspices of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and I want to make a rather more general point. This is a question not only of the European regime or of bananas as a fruit, although I believe they are the most eaten fruit in the world and have all the qualities that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, listed, but of finding ways to diversify the consumption of the banana and its by-products in order to provide a greater market for the producers wherever they produce this commodity. Small producers everywhere, but particularly in the Caribbean, have a special case. Many of them used to produce sugar, but the effects of the sugar prices and, indeed, the European Union sugar regime, among other things, meant that they chose to diversity into bananas. They have a particular problem because of the climate—we are all aware of the hurricanes that caused havoc in some of those tiny islands last year—so they need to be able to produce a crop that can be planted and reproduced within a short time if it is destroyed one year. Both sugar and bananas fall into that category. There is a special case to be made, which is why I urge consideration of further ways of using the banana. Like sugar, which is now finding another market in ethanol production as an energy source, bananas as a fruit could certainly produce some kind of energy source. A use could presumably be found even for the by-products of the banana—the foliage and the fibre, which is currently simply burnt and wasted and adds to environmental problems—as a biomass source of fuel. I therefore ask the Minister to say, when he replies, whether the Government can in any way urge the European Commission’s Research Directorate, not its Agricultural Directorate, to set up some form of research into alternative uses for the banana and its by-products. At a recent CPA meeting here—perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, will come across this when he attends his meetings in the Caribbean tomorrow—there was a suggestion that a research committee or research council should be set up in the Commonwealth, and particularly in the Caribbean, to look into this issue.