Bananas harvested and prepared for packaging on the Plunkett Farm, Albion Mountain, St. Mary. - Ian Allen/Staff Photographer

The Windward Islands Banana Development and Export Company (WIBDECO) has plans to diversify into products that may shift it outside its agricultural base.

A decision on the products is pending a study by United Kingdom-based consultants, but bananas will remain WIBDECO's core product.

Chief executive officer Bernard Cornibert said the consultants were already commissioned.

The Castries, St. Lucia-based regional company is trying to snatch back revenues lost from declining production of bananas from the Windward Islands.

"We need to look at a range of other products that we can handle and they need not necessarily be, although we are looking at it very seriously, other agricultural products," said Cornibert.

"And note that I said the word products and not produce, because by products rather than produce, we could be looking at not fresh produce but processed goods and products."

Hit hard

The Windward Islands, an exporter of bananas to Europe, was hit heavily several years ago when changes to the trading regime for the fruit were forced by Latin American producers, who argued that the preferential market and prices were discriminatory and counter to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.

The WTO ruling favouring the Latin Americans, discouraged Caribbean producers who were unable to compete on price with larger LatAm farmers.

In 2003, the latest available statistics found online, the Wind-wards - encompassing St. Lucia as the biggest producer, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, and Grenada - exported 67,766 tonnes of bananas, compared to 238,672 tonnes a decade earlier.

Most significant decline

Perhaps the most significant example of the decline was in tiny Grenada, whose contribution to the island bloc's exports was 394 tonnes in 2003, comapred to 4,688 tonnes in 1993.

The number of farms is estimated to have declined from 27,000 to under 10,000.

Now Cornibert says WIBDECO is also considering new investments to expand its supply base.

"Until a few years ago ... not only were we a one-product company dealing only in bananas, we had essentially a single supply source which was the Windward Islands.

Dominican Republic has been added as a supplier, which the WIBDECO manager said has generated debate.

He said, however, that it was a necessary move to sustain the company's supplies.

- CMC and Gleaner reports