According to the Spanish interprofessional association, Intercitrus, over the last eleven years, it has done this “on up to seven occasions.” Between 2013 and 2018, in many years on dates around the 15th of September, although in others in October, the Citrus Growers’ Association (CGA) decreed a suspension of shipments similar to this year’s, which is limited to one production area (the earliest, which is about to end the campaign) and only in the case of oranges, with neither mandarins, which are about to reach the peak of their shipments to Europe, nor grapefruit or lemons being affected.
In all these cases, the CGA’s aim was to avoid the total suspension of shipments by the European Commission. And the truth is that several times it managed this and, when it didn’t, the European Community authorities closed the market to South African fruit when the campaign was virtually over, with the compounding factor that the citrus fruit already in transit could be unloaded in European ports.
Coincidentally, on the seven occasions that South Africa decreed the stoppage of their exports to Europe, amongst the fruit that continued to arrive cases of black spot were once again detected, sources from Intercitrus comment.
The alleged plant protection step adopted by South Africa is also aimed at “hiding the infection unleashed in the north and the east of this country and the failure of its systems to fight against black spot,” the Chairwoman of the citrus fruit interprofessional association, Inmaculada Sanfeliu, stated. For this reason, the organisation qualifies as “falsehoods” all these announcements and the rest of the steps that the country in the southern hemisphere affirms as having adopted to contain the pest, given “their inefficiency or lack of willingness when controlling a pest that is regulated in the EU as a priority disease.”
Sanfeliu comments on all this that the South African exporter employers’ association’s “cynical attitude has gone even further, if possible,” since it has gone “from criticising the European Community from preventing the entry of this dangerous fungus” to “displaying this step as an example of their spirit of cooperation with the producers from Europe and, particularly, from Spain.”
This is the reason behind Intercitrus insisting on the need for the European Community legislation to bring back an article that allows the EU to order an “automatic cautionary closure” of its borders in the case of more than five batches being detected that are contaminated with this pest, “as existed in the past and was removed due to South African pressure.” Only in this way, Sanfeliu indicates, will the “colonisation” of European citrus fruit growing be avoided.
Regarding the current situation, “given the accredited incapacity by South Africa to control this disease,” the interprofessional association demands the European Commission to order the immediate “stopping of imports” from this country.
