• They resort to the ruse of applying the treatment temperature to the container rather than, as required by European regulations, cooling the central part of the fruit for all stipulated days. In this way, the cold treatment is not effective against the False Codling Moth.
• At the beginning of this campaign, the South African employers’ association estimated that the application of cold treatment would reduce their orange sales to the EU by 20%. The truth is that until mid-September, their exports to the EU have increased by 13% compared to 2022 and by 8.3% compared to 2021.
• The interprofessional reiterates that the regulations “leave no room for interpretation”, that they are being violated, and proposes additional measures to the DG SANTE to ensure rapid and unequivocal verification of the cold treatment, as well as insisting on extending it to mandarins and grapefruits.

Intercitrus confirms that, as in 2022, South African exporters are still not complying this year – for the most part – with the EU regulations regarding cold treatment in their orange shipments to the EU. Like the previous campaign, the operators in this country resort to a technical and bureaucratic manoeuvre to avoid applying the cold treatment that the European Commission (EC) regulated in June last year to prevent the spread of the False Codling Moth (T. leucotreta) to European citrus plantations. “The responsibility for implementing EU legislation on plant health lies with the Member States, and the regulation passed is not ambiguous, leaving no room for interpretation, and its compliance is easily verifiable. It is obvious that South Africa is finding allies in the EU to not comply with what is regulated,” stated Inmaculada Sanfeliu, president of Intercitrus.

The procedure followed by these exporters is the same as that implemented for almost the entire previous campaign: South African orange shipments arrive at European ports with a phytosanitary certificate that, on paper, certifies compliance with the protocol, and somewhere along the line, inspectors accept it without requesting temperature records from the three pulp probes, allowing their normal access to the European market without conducting further verification. However, the reality is that the required treatment temperature is not applied to the central part of the fruit – as explicitly required by international standards, such as ISPM 42 referenced by the European regulation – instead, the ‘ambient’ temperature, that of the container set point (not the fruit), is cooled, so this ‘alternative’ method does not guarantee the elimination of possible pest larvae inside the oranges. In this regard, the interprofessional reminds that two-thirds of South African citrus imported by the EU arrive through a single port, Rotterdam.

Therefore, Intercitrus urges the EC’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) – which must be aware of the practice by now but is not competent to conduct inspections – to enforce its own rules and to regulate a rapid and unequivocal verification system for compliance with cold treatment. Specifically, the interprofessional demands that, before heading to the European destination, the South African operator specifies which port will be the entry point (to alert inspectors at the destination and schedule the mandatory checks accordingly). Additionally, it requires that all containers – as stipulated by ISPM 42 – incorporate the three pulp probes that must measure and record the temperature of the central part of the fruit (not the ambient temperature of the container). Thirdly, it proposes creating a virtual platform to store the temperature records of these three probes, downloaded from the data logger that each orange container originating from a country with False Codling Moth destined for the EU is required to have. Such data – which would unequivocally demonstrate compliance with the cold treatment – should be made available to the competent authorities of the twenty-seven member states for at least one year.

In addition to this, the interprofessional insists that – given that tangerines and grapefruits also host this pest in the same way as oranges – cold treatment should be extended to these two citrus species.

The Citrus Growers Association (CGA) of Southern Africa, before the start of the current export season, estimated that the cost of implementing the measures required by the EU would be around $75 million and, given the shortage of containers prepared to comply with such treatment and as they claimed, would result in a reduction of their orange exports by between 15 and 25%, which is about 80,000 tons less. The reality is that, according to their own data until week 37 of this year (mid-September), the volume of South African oranges marketed in the EU (almost 24 million boxes, about 360,000 tons) is 13% higher than that of the same date in 2022 and 8.3% higher than that of the same week in 2021.

The CGA, in fact, warned at that time that the South African sector would not be “able to accommodate (what is required by the EU, it is understood) the enormous volumes of fruit exported from South Africa to the EU.” According to their statistics, the EU is indeed, by far, their main market, where in 2022, 32% of their exported oranges were sold (far ahead of the Middle East, with 21%). Furthermore, on July 27, 2022, and as evidence of their rejection of the regulation approved by Brussels, the South African Government requested the opening of consultations within the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body, without any pronouncement or request for interim measures having been made so far. It is difficult to label – as has been formally argued before the international organization – that the EC’s measure is “protectionist” when South Africa is obliged to export its citrus or other fruits with a similar (more demanding, actually) cold treatment by the phytosanitary authorities of up to 20 countries (including the US, China, Korea, Japan, India, or Taiwan), and in no case has South Africa filed any complaint to the WTO for this reason.