Egypt has already displaced South Africa as a major citrus supplier in the EU; during the last season alone, it shipped almost 310,000 tons of oranges, 21% more than a year earlier, while Turkey shipped 240,555 tons of citrus to the EU. The problem is that the Egyptian and Turkish productions cost less and are subject to fewer phytosanitary regulations than the Spanish productions.
Castellon producers have been demanding for years that the EU requires all countries to be subject to the same rules and now it seems that the European Commission is willing to strengthen its demands a little more on Egyptian and Turkish oranges. At least, this is what could be inferred from Commissioner Stella Kyriakides' answer to a question posed by the socialist MEP Inmaculada Rodriguez-Piñero. According to her answer, it seems Europe is now open to intensifying controls in those countries after the EU has detected a significant number of imports with more pesticide residues than allowed.
"According to the RASFF -the Commission's rapid alert system for food and feed-, so far in 2021, the Union has rejected 94 batches of citrus from Turkey and 30 batches from Egypt because they had an excessive presence of phytosanitary products or for containing pesticides banned in the Union," stated Rodriguez-Piñero.
"The incidents detected refer to batches of lemons and oranges, but mandarins stand out because they contained traces of active substances that are banned in the Union, such as chlorpyrifos, chlorpyrifos-methyl, or prochloraz. Turkey was questioned after a Commission audit in November 2019, which led to increasing the inspection threshold to 10%, while only 5% of mandarin and 10% of the oranges coming from Egypt are randomly inspected," she added.
That's why she asked the Commission if it was considering increasing the minimum inspection threshold for mandarin, orange, and lemon consignments from Turkey and Egypt. She also asked the Commission if it had the intention of temporarily halting imports or carrying out new audits if the EU continues to detect levels of banned substances in citrus from Turkey and Egypt.
New audits in 2022
In its response, the Commission opened itself to the possibility of establishing new measures for fruit imports from these countries. They also stated that they would take into account the incidents in which the pesticide residues were exceeded when selecting all the countries to be audited in 2022.
Source: elperiodicomediterraneo.com
