After years of battling unsuccessfully against “unscientific and discriminatory” European Union restrictions on South African citrus imports, the industry has taken its complaint to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The complaint is essentially that the EU is putting up unwarranted trade barriers in order to protect Spanish orange growers from increasing South African competition. South Africa is the world’s largest citrus exporter after Spain and a third of South Africa’s exports go to the EU.
The EU has been implementing increasingly harsh – and increasingly expensive – requirements on South African citrus producers. It says the measures are necessary to protect the EU against two diseases – citrus black spot and false coddling moth – being brought in with South African oranges.
The requirements were stepped up in May. The local citrus industry says it has already spent billions complying with existing EU requirements and the new measures are both unnecessary and unaffordable.
A report in Bizcommunity says taking the issue to the WTO is a significant development, and it follows unsuccessful discussions with the EU.
It says the move has the support of agriculture minister John Steenhuisen and trade and industry minister Parks Tau. Steenhuisen emphasised that the citrus industry sustains 140 000 livelihoods at farm level.
“It is a priority for government to protect these jobs and to make sure citrus can continue to play the essential economic role it does in so many rural communities throughout the country,” he said.
Tau noted that the WTO dispute resolution process was used by all countries, and this was “therefore not an aggressive or confrontational stance by South Africa.”
A report in the Mail and Guardian says the EU is not at risk from either disease, both because of the nature of the diseases and because of the “world-class” risk management systems that ensured South Africa’s citrus exports were safe.
The world’s leading scientists had proved that citrus black spot could not be transmitted via the fruit, the South African government and the Citrus Growers’ Association of Southern Africa said in a joint statement. False coddling moth was unlikely to establish permanent populations in the colder parts of the EU.
Faten Aggad, the executive director at the African Future Policies Hub, told the Mail & Guardian that the EU’s international trade behaviour “has always been its unilateral action not to tackle real issues but to protect its domestic industries — in this case to respond to the citrus industry pressure in Southern Europe which by their own admission is less and less competitive”.
