Parabolic bundles, products of conjugacy classes, and quantum cohomology

In this version referee's comments have been incorporated. Besides minor corrections, new material has been added on irrational markings. To appear in Ann. Inst. Fourier. We prove a condition for the existence of flat bundles on the punctured two-sphere with prescribed holonomies around the punctures, involving Gromov-Witten invariants of generalized flag varieties. This generalizes the case of special unitary bundles described by S. Agnihotri and the second author and independently P. Belkale.