• The interprofessional warns that the risk of entry of the ‘False Colding Moth’ and ‘Citrus Black Spot’ is “unacceptable”, that if action is not taken now and progress is not made on reciprocity in “three years the situation generated by the pests will become irreversible” and the abandonment of fields will be accelerated.
• The MEPs pledged to promote political initiatives and to give “visibility” to the serious problem and endorsed the arguments of the Spanish citrus sector, on whose future depend twice as many people (280,000) as those working, for example, in South Africa (140,000).
• Today (and yesterday) the Standing Committee on Plant Health will meet again to discuss the measures to be taken, but Intercitrus fears that the technical debate will be prolonged and contaminated by other “geopolitical” interests of some Member States or linked to other common EU policies, such as trade or development cooperation.

Intercitrus met on Wednesday with Spanish MEPs to consolidate a pressure group in Brussels to force the Commission (EC) to impose a cold treatment in transit to European citrus imports to prevent the arrival of certain pests, mainly of Thaumatotibia leucotreta. The EU considers that this pest is a quarantine and pest and that fighting it and other quarantine pests of the same condition, such as B. dorsalis or B. zonata, is a priority as they represent a serious phytosanitary, economic, and environmental risk for the European citrus. Spanish citrus fruits are subject to an obligatory cold treatment, without choice and without possible contestation, to be able to export to any market in the world that produces citrus. Paradoxically, no third country applies cold treatment when exporting to the EU, but when it comes to other major markets such as the USA, China or Japan -among others- those same large suppliers of Europe, such as South Africa itself, do agree to do so.

The meeting with the MEPs took place the day before the Phytosanitary Standing Committee (SCOPAFF) debated, on December 16 and 17, and for the third consecutive month, the measures that will be applied in response to the record number of interceptions of foreign pathogens in imports from non-EU countries, i.e. more than 200 until the sixth of December, 58% of which were found in citrus imports from South Africa and Zimbabwe. The MEPs who attended the meeting endorsed the arguments of the citrus sector, promised to give ‘visibility’ to the problem in Brussels and to seek political alliances between the southern member states, which are also affected by these pests, to force the EC to impose the cold treatment in transit to these imports. Other actions were proposed to advance in the matter of reciprocity and to establish more rigorous protocols to curb the threat of a second foreign pathogen that also poses an unacceptable risk to European plantations, the Citrus Black Spot (CBS). This was the first meeting in a set of meetings with more members of the European chamber, which will be held at the beginning of next year. 

Intercitrus said it feared that “the debate, which is strictly technical and defined by EFSA scientific reports, will drag on for too long and be tainted by the geopolitical and commercial interests of the northern EU countries –as they are in the port, import, repackaging, and distribution business– or that circumstances also outside the phytosanitary field come into play, such as the Community’s own commercial policy or cooperation development policy.”

MEPs from all the Spanish citrus growing areas participated in this first meeting with Intercitrus (Cataluña, Comunidad Valenciana, Murcia y Andalucía), several of them members of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development as well as the Committee on Trade, Industry and Commerce. To name a few, there was Inmaculada Rodríguez Piñeiro (PSOE); Juan Ignacio Zoido (PP), Mazaly Aguilar (Vox) or Marcos Ros Sempere (C’s). On the part of the interprofessional, attended its president, Inmaculada Sanfeliu (CGC, private trade), as well as Cristóbal Aguado (ASAJA, College of Production) and Enrique Bellés (Agrifood Cooperatives). There were several short-term initiatives proposed, such as organizing a photographic exhibition at the headquarters of the Commission itself in Brussels or in its vicinity showing the damage that some of the 16 foreign pests introduced since the beginning of this century, such as the so-called South African Cotonet or Trioza erytreae (HLB vector), and others that threaten to do so have caused or can cause to the plantations

Sanfeliu insisted that the risk of these pests becoming established “is disproportionate” and that South Africa’s systems approach, chosen to avoid cold treatment in the EU, is “unacceptable”. “A high probability of non-presence is not an absence. Either there is the presence of potentially transmitting individuals or there is not, and currently the regulation refers to total absence, not partial absence. The well-executed cold treatment leaves no room for interpretation, nor for risk probabilities: it guarantees the absence of pest, and that is why this measure seems to us non-negotiable,” he remarked before the MEPs. Aguado, meanwhile, predicted that if measures are not taken now, “in three years, considering the spectacular increases in the area planted in South Africa or Egypt, the damage to the Spanish and European citriculture, because of the abandonment of fields that are already causing, will be irreversible. Bellés, finally, recalled and thanked the efforts made in the past by the Spanish MEPs to introduce, in the regulation of the single CMO, the concept of reciprocity. “That amendment did not go ahead and now is accelerating the process of destruction of European citrus farms, with the serious economic, environmental, depletion of CO2 removal capacity and landscape that this entails,” said the representative of Agri-Food Cooperatives.

Intercitrus members clarified that, far from what was stated by the South African lobby in Brussels, the application of the aforementioned cold treatment in transit is “perfectly acceptable, it is an internationally standardized process, which South Africa already applies in its exports to other major markets”. Its cost would represent less than one third of the expenses that Spanish exporters currently have to assume to comply with the requirements of the protocols of countries such as those mentioned above. “”Reciprocity – for diseases such as ‘Citrus black spot’ – should mean that the EU should demand from the countries that suffer from it protocols as strict as those applied to us by the authorities of these large markets to prevent much less harmful pests such as, in our case, Ceratitis capitata” Sanfeliu insisted. “EFSA has already accredited the failure of the ‘systems approach’ that South Africa applies for its exports to the EU and has shown its weaknesses, so we would not understand that the Commission’s reaction is delayed much longer: if, as South Africa argues, applying it would endanger 140,000 jobs in that country, not doing so would mean playing Russian roulette with our plantations, with the 280,000 jobs and 450 companies that, only in Spain, live directly from our citrus,” concluded the president of Intercitrus.