The European Union is the biggest market in the world for bananas, so a significant share of all bananas in the world are shipped to the EU. Yet with country-specific volume quotas, import licences, and progressive duty rates, the EU strongly interferes in the world trade of bananas – resulting in a disadvantage for banana producers in Latin America. Due to its time-sensitive supply chain, the banana industry faces large-scale vertical integration, with a small number of transnational corporations dominating the banana trade and controlling markets and prices.

As a result of the steady decrease in banana prices over the past decades, the daily life of many plantation workers and small farmers in producer countries is characterized by unfair wages, poor and dangerous working conditions, and an extensive use of pesticides – issues which have also been criticized by human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch.