A passer-by looks at the swollen Roseau River in Dominica after the passage of Hurricane Dean on Friday. - AP

CASTRIES, St. Lucia (AP):

Hurricane Dean has delivered a potentially fatal blow to a once-vibrant banana industry on three Eastern Caribbean islands, authorities said Saturday.

In St. Lucia and Martinique, two adjacent islands that caught the brunt of Dean's 100 mph (160 kph) winds on Friday, authorities said the entire harvest was ruined by flooding or toppled trees. The storm also battered the banana industry in nearby Dominica.

"From what we have seen, farmers may have to start all over again as the last of the banana industry may have been wiped out," said Stephenson King, acting Prime Minister of St. Lucia.

St. Lucia exported roughly 28,000 metric tons of bananas in 2005, down from the 1990 peak of 121,000 metric tons - a decline attributed to disease, competition and the loss of preferential treatment in the key European market.

Tourism takes charge

Tourism overtook bananas as the country's main source of foreign exchange over the past decade, but hundreds of families in rural areas still depend on the industry.

The former British colony of 168,000 people has fewer than 2,000 banana farmers, compared to more than 10,000 in the early 1990s.

On the French island of Martinique, Agriculture Minister Louis Daniel Berthome said banana farmers were emotionally devastated.

Dozens of houses in St. Lucia lost their roofs, and some people were forced to flee their homes because of flooding. A 62-year-old man who drowned while trying to save his cow from a rain-swollen river was the island's only casualty.

Martinique's authorities estimate repairing the island's infrastructure will cost US$200 million to US$270 million.

On Saturday, electricity was restored to 90 per cent of residents in St. Lucia and businesses reopened in Castries, the capital.