Rapota Describes Scheme For Transporting Peaches And Kiwi To Russian Federation Through Belarus

The EU is trying to ship sanction fruit and vegetables to the Russian Federation under disguise of African countries, the Russian officials claim.

Russia remains seriously concerned about Benin, as well as Cameroon, The Central African Republic, the Ivory Coast and a whole list of tropical countries. This is the result of the session dedicated to discussion of the sore issuies, connected with re-export shipments of the quarantineable products to the territory of the Russian Federation through Belarus and EU countries, writes kp.ru.

The session was initiated by the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance and held at the ground of the Permanent Committee of the “union state”. After Russia had imposed economic counter-measures and banned import of vegetables and fruit to its territory from the EU member states the ways of inflow, the geography of the countries of origin and the scopes of the quarantineable products considerably altered.

There started shipments from the countries like Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Sierra Leone, Mali, the Central African Republic, previously not presented at our market of such production. The corresponding services of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus are verifying the authenticity of the phytosanitary certificates of both the countries of origin and the countries of re-export.

By today, they have detected over 600 cases of shipment of production with fake certificates of the countries of origin – these are the states of tropical Africa, and in some cases there were fake re-export phytosanitary certificates of the EU countries. Herein, all countries confirmed authentity of the presented certificates.

State Secretary of the “union state” Grigoriy Rapota has commented upon the situation as follows:

- I will give you an example. In 2016, 8733 tons of vegetables and fruit , including 1400 tons of peaches, 899 tons of nectarines and 310 tons of kiwi, were shipped to Russia from the EU, Benin being the country of origin. The Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance conducted negotiations with the Ambassador of Benin in Moscow, during which it turned out Benin did not grow peaches, nectarines or kiwi then. The Russian and the Belarusian sides have questions to the EU countries with regard to issuance of re-export phytosanitary certificates with false information about the country of origin of the goods. It is also necessary to clarify how they conduct surveillance of the quarantineable products at the territory of the EU, whether they record the imported and re-exported production, how they confirm authentity or faithfulness of cargos?

The experts of the Eurasian Economic Union’ Commission, who participated in the session, agreed that the legal base of the EU which regulated such issues needed improvement.

Upon the results of the meeting the participants took the decision to work through the above-mentioned issues together with the Eurasian Economic Commission.