The Spanish Citrus Interprofessional (Intercitrus) has denounced “the alarming loss of credit” in terms of food security that the European Union is suffering (EU) for its “passivity” in the face of repeated health alerts regarding Turkish citrus imports.
This is how the president of Intercitrus, Inmaculada Sanfeliu, describes in a statement what has been happening this year with the official figures from RASFF, the EU Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed, which accredits “unprecedented levels of non-compliance in this matter.” Indeed, from January to October 27, the citrus fruit of Turkey accumulated 181 notifications, 16.4 times more than those registered in all of 2019 (11) and much more than double those of 2020 (75) ».
In all cases these are games in which the presence of pesticides was accredited above the Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) and in which other pesticides not authorized by the EU were detected due to their toxicity to man and environmental impact, explains the interprofessional.
Turkey and Egypt in the spotlight
Turkey and Egypt account for 90.4% of the RASFF alert set registered for such reasons (226 out of 250) in the aforementioned period. And the most repeated problem is with the group of insecticides whose withdrawal has caused the greatest impact on Spanish citrus production, those of the chlorpyrifos family: up to 66% of the alerts refer to lots in which the presence was detected. of any of these substances prohibited in the EU (methyl-chlorpyrifos, chlorpyrifos or chlorpyrifos-ethyl).
These are the insecticides that Spanish citrus growers used to combat a wide spectrum of pests and those that, specifically, “were key” to keep the so-called under control. Cotonet from South Africa. A group of phytosanitary products that stopped being used after the EFSA (European Food Safety Agency) confirmed that they were a potential threat to the health of consumers.
In this sense, the interprofessional stresses that “the EU is allowing them to continue to apply to the fruit of Turkey and Egypt, which the vast majority are also accessing the community market».
The situation of metil-clorpirifos in Spain it also contrasts with that of Italy, as Intercitrus explains, which recalls that ” Spanish authorities ordered their immediate withdrawal in April 2020 while the Italians consented to its use for nectarines and peaches thanks to an exceptional use permit. Faced with the comparative grievance created, the Ministry of Agriculture argued that, in November 2020, when the community ban became effective and the MRL for this substance was reduced to a minimum, these fruits would no longer be in the food chain, which could not occur with Spanish citrus. The truth is that, despite what was said at the time, the transalpine authorities have maintained the exceptional authorization this year ”.
In the aforementioned statement, the entity representing the citrus sector assures that “the first reaction of the European Commission (EC) to the repeated non-compliance of Turkish citrus fruits occurred in May 2020 when it became consider your mandarins and oranges as risk products and since then it has been ordered to inspect at the border 10 and 5%, respectively, of the imported batches. For this reason, given the forcefulness of the data, the EC decided to raise this percentage to 20% of the consignments of mandarins, oranges and now also, Turkish lemons ”.
Anyway, Intercitrus considers that this percentage is still “very low”, and reiterates “the evidence that the remaining 80% of uncontrolled merchandise, logically, is being produced with the same standards and containing the same levels of residues. That is, they continue to pose a threat to the health of European consumers, since Turkey does not in vain export some 300,000 tonnes of citrus fruits to the EU per year ”.
In this sense, the interprofessional indicates that the situation generated with Turkey It contrasts with the relations maintained by large European distributors with Spanish exporters, on whom they impose protocols on waste “much more demanding, with MRLs up to 70% lower than the official ones, claiming to comply with concepts not regulated by the EU ( such as applying a maximum sum of MRLs per sample in percentage), even going so far as to propose ‘black lists’ of discretionary prohibited pesticides ».
The EU’s ‘double standard’
In this regard, Intercitrus points out that “the EU, beyond what has been said, maintains another equally questionable ‘double standard’: with programs such as ‘From farm to table’ it aims to force agriculture to reduce the use of phytosanitary products by 50% in the next 8 years and, meanwhile, it allows pesticides already banned on the Community market – such as chlorpyrifos itself – to continue to be produced on its territory and exported to third countries such as those mentioned.
In the opinion of the citrus organization, «the complacent attitude of the community executive towards Turkey, maintained for so many semesters at the expense of consumers’ food safety, is only understood by the interest of avoiding a repetition of episodes such as the one that occurred at the beginning of 2020, when The Turkish President decided to break the 2016 agreement signed with the EC (which involved financial aid of 6,000 million euros to face the Syrian refugee crisis) and pushed or let the migrants who were in his territory pass, causing a serious humanitarian crisis on the Greek-Turkish border».
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