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BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - The European Union claimed victory in its trade dispute with the United States over bananas Saturday, saying a truce reached Friday prevented Washington from unilaterally imposing punishing trade sanctions.
``This is a highly satisfactory outcome for the European Union,'' the 15-nation bloc's trade commissioner, Sir Leon Brittan, said in a statement.
``I'm particularly pleased that it has been made clear that the United States has no World Trade Organization authorization to impose its threatened unilateral sanctions,'' he added.
Brittan said that under a truce drawn up by WTO Director- General Renato Ruggiero and effectively approved by both sides Friday, the WTO would first consider whether the EU's revamped banana import regime was breaking world trade rules.
Only if the EU was found guilty would the question of punishment arise.
``This is exactly what we always wanted to achieve,'' Brittan said, adding that the EU had enjoyed the support of the ''overwhelming majority of WTO members.''
At the center of the row is the EU's controversial banana regime - a complex set of regulations for managing the import and distribution of the fruit in its 15 member countries which favors imports from former European colonies.
The United States, which does not have bananas of its own to export, and five Latin American producer countries won a ruling from a WTO panel in 1997 saying that the regime then in place was in violation of the world trade body's rules and agreements.
Washington says the replacement regime -- in force since January 1 -- is no better and it argued that all it had to do was to ask the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body for the green light to impose sanctions.
The plan drawn up by Ruggiero delayed the possible imposition of the planned sanctions -- $500 million in punitive tariffs on selected EU goods -- from any time in the next few days to March 12 at the earliest.
Under the plan the two trading powers will over the next month engage in consultations to find a mutually agreed solution to the problem.
The United States Friday also claimed the truce represented a victory for itself. Its ambassador to the WTO, Rita Hayes, called it ``a big win for us...We got all we wanted.''
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