• From January to last October 27, they have triggered a record 181 pesticide food alerts, 16.4 times more than in all of 2019 and more than twice as many as in 2020.
• 66% of all RASFF citrus notifications are due to the chlorpyrifos group, a pesticide banned in the EU because of its potential risk to human health.

The Spanish Citrus Interprofessional denounces “the alarming loss of credibility” in food safety that is suffering the European Union (EU) for its “passivity” to repeated health alerts with imports of Turkish citrus. This is how the president of Intercitrus, Inmaculada Sanfeliu, describes what has been happening this year with the official figures of the RASFF, the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed of the EU, which shows unprecedented levels of non-compliance in this area. Indeed, from January to October 27, Turkish citrus accumulated 181 notifications, 16.4 times more than those recorded in all of 2019 (11) and much more than twice as many as in 2020 (75). In all cases, these are consignments in which the presence of pesticides above the Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) was accredited and or in which other pesticides not authorized by the EU were detected due to their toxicity to humans and or environmental impact.

Turkey and Egypt account for 90.4% of the total RASFF alerts recorded for these reasons (226 out of 250) in the mentioned period. These are the insecticides that Spanish citrus farmers used to combat a wide range of pests and specifically were crucial in controlling the so-called ‘South African Citrus Cotonet’. This group of pesticides ceased to be used after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) confirmed they posed a potential threat to consumer health. However, the EU is now allowing them to continue being applied to fruit from Turkey and Egypt, the vast majority of which is also accessing the EU market. The most frequently repeated issue is with the group of insecticides that have had the greatest impact on Spanish citrus production, those belonging to the chlorpyrifos family: up to 66% of alerts refer to batches where the presence of one of these prohibited substances in the EU was detected (methyl chlorpyrifos, chlorpyrifos, or chlorpyrifos-ethyl). These are the insecticides that Spanish citrus farmers used to combat a wide range of pests and specifically were crucial in controlling the so-called ‘South African Citrus Cotonet’.

The situation of methyl chlorpyrifos in our country, moreover, contrasts with that of Italy. The Spanish authorities ordered its immediate withdrawal in April 2020 while the Italian authorities allowed its use for nectarine and peach thanks to an exceptional use permit. In response to the created comparative grievance, the Ministry of Agriculture argued that by November 2020, when the EU ban would take effect and the MRL of this substance would be minimized, these fruits would no longer be in the food chain, which could not happen with Spanish citrus fruits. The truth is that, despite what was said then, the transalpine authorities have maintained this year the exceptional authorization.

The European Commission’s (EC) first reaction to the repeated non-compliances of Turkish citrus occurred in May 2020 when its mandarins and oranges were classified as ‘high-risk products’, and since then, inspection at the border has been mandated for 10% and 5%, respectively, of imported batches. Yesterday, precisely in light of the robustness of the data, the EC decided to increase this percentage to 20% for shipments of mandarins, oranges, and now also Turkish lemons. Nevertheless, Intercitrus considers this percentage to still be very low and reiterates the evidence that the remaining 80% of uncontrolled merchandise logically continues to be produced with the same standards and containing the same levels of residues. This implies that they continue to pose a threat to the health of European consumers, especially considering that Turkey exports around 300,000 tons of citrus to the EU annually.

The situation with Turkey contrasts with the relationships that European large-scale retailers have with Spanish exporters, to whom they impose much more demanding residue protocols, with MRLs up to 70% lower than the official ones, demanding compliance with concepts not regulated by the EU (such as applying a maximum sum of MRLs per sample as a percentage), and even proposing discretionary ‘blacklists’ of prohibited pesticides.

Beyond the aforementioned, the EU maintains another equally questionable “double standard”: with programs like ‘From Farm to Fork’, it aims to force agriculture to reduce pesticide use by 50% over the next 8 years. Meanwhile, it allows pesticides already banned in the EU market – such as chlorpyrifos itself – to continue being produced within its territory and exported to third countries like those mentioned.

In the view of Intercitrus, the “accommodating” attitude of the European executive towards Turkey, maintained for so many semesters at the expense of consumer food safety, can only be understood by the interest in avoiding episodes like the one that occurred in early 2020 when the Turkish president decided to break the 2016 agreement signed with the EC – which involved a financial aid of 6 billion euros to address the Syrian refugee crisis – and pushed or let migrants pass through its territory, causing a serious humanitarian crisis on the Greek-Turkish border.