A study prepared by The Union of Farmers reveals that the European alert system of the RASFF (European Commission authority for food safety) notified last year a total of 428 fruit and vegetable alerts bound for the market of the European Union from Turkey, which had the presence of residues of pesticides, among them the Methyl-chlorpyrifos and Chlorpyrifos prohibited here or pesticides that exceeded the Maximum Residue Limits allowed in the community market.
From this study of the agrarian organization, it appears that a total of 173 corresponded to citrus and 164 were due to the presence of Methyl Chlorpyrifos or Chlorpyrifos from imports of fruits and vegetables from Turkey. Egypt For its part, it received 62 notifications of official European health alerts in 2021, of which 39 were citrus fruits and 42 were detected with Methyl Chlorpyrifos or Chlorpyrifos. Turkey and Egypt thus continue their upward escalation and the data for 2021 suppose an increase in product alerts for the first country of 57% and 343% for those of the second, over those of 2020.
Despite the magnitude and importance of these figures, the community authorities remain quite passive. A history of recent audits by the European Commission, which La Unió has been able to access, reveals that since 1998 to Egypt no specific control has been carried out on citrus fruits and since 2011 none related to agricultural products. Turkey has not been audited for pesticides for more than two years. With the data in hand and the rise in alerts, it appears that the European Union does not carry out exhaustive controls on imports.
La Unió believes that the recently launched EU presidency by France should serve to advance reciprocity, as it has been set as a priority to ensure that imported agricultural products respect the same standards as Europeans. “We cannot continue to accept imports into our European market of products that do not respect the standards that we impose on our own productions. Has no sense. Acting for a reciprocity of the rules will be one of the priorities of the French presidency ”, said French Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie.
“It is time for Spain and France, two European agricultural powers, join forces with other countries of the European Union, to avoid unfair competition and to equate production standards for imported products with ours. An effort must be made to transform this intention into reality and the member states must apply this reduction of pesticides from their strategy From farm to table as soon as possible to imported products, in the interest of food security and sustainability ” , assures Carles Peris, general secretary of LA UNIÓ.
Thanks in large part to the repeated complaints by LA UNIÓ about the alerts from Turkey, the European Commission increased the inspection pressure on Turkish citrus fruits through Implementing Regulation 2021/1900 of October 27, 2021, raising the controls up to 20% in citrus fruits (lemons, mandarins and oranges), pomegranates and peppers. Despite this, health alerts have been reproducing during the last two months and therefore from LA UNIÓ it is committed to suspending imports of these productions from Turkey until it guarantees food safety in the products it intends to put in the European Union market. In the same way, it requests for Egypt a minimum control of its citrus fruits of 20%, because at the moment they are only random.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.