With the establishment of a single European banana regime, the European Union had set itself a number of objectives which were not always easy to reconcile with each other. Indeed, it was not possible to satisfy all members and the import regime was to become a source of major international trade conflict. The objectives of the European Union were to:

• harmonise the various pre-1993 national regimes
• protect banana production in EU member states
• supply European consumers with 'reasonably' priced bananas
• respect European obligations towards ACP countries, as defined by the Lomé Convention, in order to support the economic development of these countries
• reconcile international obligations (notably under GATT) with national interests.

For producer countries and territories, for the most part highly dependent on their income from banana exports, the import policies of the European Union were of crucial importance. In most of the 12 traditional ACP banana exporting countries, the cost of production was approximately twice as high as for dollar bananas. In the case of European producers, the cost could be up to three times as high. Higher production costs meant that these countries and regions could only sell on a protected market. Conscious of this, the European Union set up a system of quotas and tariffs (and a system of direct support to its own banana farmers) to limit the entry of dollar bananas.

The resulting internal price on the European market, substantially higher than the world price, enabled ACP and European producers to survive on the market. Preferential access to the European market was designed to protect them from direct competition with dollar bananas. The Common Organisation of the Market in bananas, or European banana regime, therefore consisted of complex mechanisms reflecting the diverging interests of its various members. It is certain that without the protection of this new regime, the banana economy of most of these countries and territories would not have survived until 2005. It is still too early to say whether the abandoning of the most important mechanism of the banana import regime in January 2006 will cause the disappearance of some exporting countries from the EU market.