Word: banana
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...laid the blame squarely on the E.U.'s trade restrictions. The U.S. Trade Representative and the rest of the Clinton Administration bought the line, at least officially. And to this day, Chiquita officials insist that's the case. Steven Warshaw, Chiquita's president, told TIME, "The E.U.'s illegal banana regime is the cause of the company's poor financial results since 1992. It would be absurd to conclude otherwise... It is well accepted that the E.U.'s banana regime was specifically designed to expropriate market share from U.S. banana interests to benefit European multinationals and other interests within...
...company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past 15 years shows that a good portion of Chiquita's decline is attributable to other causes. In the years it posted record losses, Chiquita said in the SEC reports, its costs "were significantly impacted" by outbreaks of banana disease, bad weather, a strike by workers in Honduras, as well as shipping and operating losses from its "Japanese 'green' banana trading operations...
...Banana pricing wars also took a toll, but even more telling, the company ran up its long-term debt so that cash payments for interest charges spiraled from $52.6 million in 1990 to $164.3 million in 1993. Even if Chiquita sales had reached the level the WTO said they would have in the absence of European restrictive policies, the company still would have recorded losses or, at best, a marginal profit. As a Wall Street investment analyst who tracked the banana industry put it in 1992, "we have serious doubts about the abilities of management to deal with the company...
Lindner, a nonsmoking, nondrinking, nonswearing Baptist, has been a major supporter of the Republican Party, its candidates and causes. This may account for the less than enthusiastic response that Lindner received when he first took his banana case to the Clinton Administration early in 1993. In fact, at that time the U.S. Trade Representative's internal memos show that bananas were a low priority for the U.S. government. What's more, USTR and State Department officials had given--and would continue to give--repeated assurances to leaders of Caribbean governments that the U.S. supported European preferences for their bananas...
Throughout this period, Lindner's allies in Congress kept the pressure on the Clinton Administration. On June 21, Senator Dole wrote to Kantor: "I am concerned that time is running out in the banana case. U.S. banana companies are on the verge of suffering even greater irreparable damage as a result of the E.U. and Latin practices...