Banana row slides to slippery conclusion

There you have it. At the end of years of acrimony which threatened to undermine the whole fabric of the most recent world trade accord, the World Trade Organisation, the US and the EU are both claiming victory in the aftermath of the arbitration panel ruling on the EU's disputed banana importation regime.

When all was said and done the WTO adjudicators ruled that the amount of any loss to the US as a result of the way the EU favoured banana imports from former colonies in the Caribbean was $191.4 million (€176.5 million or £139 million). Hardly worth a trade war, one imagines, when considered against the massive volume of trade of both these global trading powers.

Depressingly, the only reasonably certain outcome of this dispute and both sides' desperate attempts to claim victory is that no greater wisdom or flexibility will be evident in far more serious upcoming disputes on aircraft noise, hormone-treated beef and genetically modified crops. Seems to me we had fewer trade wars before we had global trade accords.