UN General Assembly
1993

in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), in the European Court and within various international forums. Apart from the serious social consequences which cannot but follow a demise of the banana industry in these islands, it is also to be recognized that, in order to purchase goods and services from those very sources which advocate measures calculated to bring about that demise, we must first earn the foreign exchange to be able to do this. It can only be hoped that, in the end, sympathetic understanding will prevail over intransigence in the determination of this vital issue. In this post-cold-war era, ideological considerations have given way to political initiatives in the determination of the direction of official-aid flows. The weight given to foreign policy in deciding on foreign-aid flows means that assistance is not always necessarily directed towards areas of greater need, but is directed, rather, to areas with issues which are politically topical. With a modest per capita income which threatens the little remaining access it has to concessionary assistance, with official financial flows