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They certainly should not have come as a surprise to Chiquita, the U.S. government or anyone else. The signs had been clear for years that Europe intended to continue giving preferential status to bananas from its former colonies. An investment report prepared in October 1990 by the Wall Street firm of Shearson Lehman Bros., Inc., predicted that Europe, contrary to Chiquita's hopes, would maintain the status quo for years to come.
Even Chiquita knew at the time what it faced. In its 1992 annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company acknowledged that "although we will oppose these restrictive policies in the proper legal forums, we are prepared to adapt to this new regulated environment." By this time, Dole, the world's second largest banana producer and Chiquita's only real rival, had hedged its bets and arranged to acquire bananas from those countries with no tariffs and generous import quotas.
Meanwhile, Chiquita's business was tanking. From 1992 to 1994, the company racked up $407 million in losses. Its stock price plunged from $40 to $11 a share. In meetings with government officials, Chiquita 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 the European market ... Our stock price declined precipitously, and our industry has been substantially damaged."
While there is little question that Chiquita's sales would be higher were it not for Europe's quota and licensing system, a close look at 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's problems."
Over the 15 years ending in 1998, with the Lindners in control, Chiquita tallied total sales of $45 billion but profits of only $44 million. That's the equivalent of a $10,000 investment that returns 65[cents] a year. Not surprisingly, the company's stock is now trading at less than $5 a share.