The Diplomatic Fruit Salad: An International Incident

This week's Object of the Week (and I feel a little like a character from Sesame Street now) was inspired by a fruit salad consumed earlier in the week and features a particularly juicy file available in the forthcoming Apartheid South Africa resource.

In October 1962 the Fruit and Vegetable Canners’ Associationof Great Britain sent a deputation to the Board of Trade expressing dissatisfactionin strongly worded terms. The source of their grievance? Preferential tariffson tinned peaches, cherries and apricots from South Africa.

Image © Peter Lindberg at Wikimedia Commons

This may seem a terribly minor issue (especially consideringthe far more pressing concerns surrounding Prime Minister Verwoerd’s policiesof apartheid), but the dispute hid far more serious underlying frictions overtrade relations.

South Africa and Britain had been involved in earlier debatesduring 1960 over the provision of candied peel and citrus fruits. Under ScheduleD of the 1932 Ottawa Agreement, preferential ‘imperial tariffs’ were to begiven to the commonwealth for fruit preserved by chemicals or heat. SouthAfrica had a flourishing industry for canned fruit, particularly peaches andapricots, which were exported to Britain to be made into fruit salad. The issuewas whether these goods, which were preserved in water, counted under thisprovision. Britain said no. South Africa disagreed.

South Africa argued that the release of Britain’s contractualcommitment to maintain the preference tariff of 10% would harm South Africanexports, allowing fruit to be bought more cheaply from Spain and Italy. SouthAfrica already had problems with their own industrial producers being suppliedby European countries instead of the Cape. Britain conversely maintained that unlessthe tariffs were removed, UK firms would begin to go out of business. Spain hadjust successfully organised their production of fruit salad, making them a moreideal and cheaper alternative to UK producers. 

British Production of Canned Fruit (FO 371/161921) © The National Archives. Further reproduction prohibited without permission

Simple? Not at all. Beneath it all lay the desire forBritain to join the European Economic Community – a move which did not sit wellwith providing trade concessions to non-European nations. By 1960 PrimeMinister Harold Macmillan had already begun to take steps towards relinquishingBritish colonial interests in Africa and this marked the start of a new era ofcloser European co-operation.

Protests by UK canners ultimately fell on deaf ears. Pretoriaannounced that the “… South Africansagree[d] to [the] removal of preference on cherries but not(repeat not) on apricots and peaches.” This was their final line and theBritish government were at an impasse. Without revising the terms of the SouthAfrica Act (an agreement which had only just been ratified), they could go nofurther.

This file, available in Apartheid South Africa as part of the Archives Direct resource (full access restricted to authenticated academic institutions who have purchased a license) is systemic of theimpossible diplomatic tightrope Britain walked with South Africa and it’sfascinating to see something as insignificant as a fruit salad spiral into sucha diplomatic incident.