Letter: Banana battles

Sir: At least one newspaper in the UK is less than enthusiastic about the hegemonist shenanigans of the Americans.

The German market for bananas, now much the largest in the EU, is however almost entirely for dollar bananas, due, as Deborah Orr says, to the protocol to the treaty of Rome, signed by Germany in 1957. Adenauer wanted to avoid it. But the Americans exercised maximum pressure and he had to yield.

There was thus established in Germany a taste for these bananas, strengthened by the addition of East Germany in 1989. But is it not high time that the whistle was blown?

Germans who have had the chance to sample other sorts of bananas are enthusiastic about them, more especially since information campaigns have revealed the inhuman conditions in which dollar bananas are harvested, chemically treated and made uniform.

Professor Dr JOSEF ELFENBEIN

Mainz, Germany