Argentine lemons could be back on supermarket shelves by next year following a pledge by the US department of commerce that a new import protocol will be approved within the next 60 days.
The announcement was made during a meeting this week in Washington between Juan Manzur, governor of Tucumán and a group of regional producers with representatives of the US Department of Agriculture.
“We were told that in 60 days the regulation will be approved. Once signed, a period of public consultation opens…and provided there are no objections, we will once again be able enter this important market,” Manzur told the press after the meeting.
Under US rules, the standard public consultation period runs for 30 days, but this can be extended if any objections are raised. A challenge by California producers could delay the process by several months.
Nevertheless, this virtually guarantees that the market will be open by 2017.
Manzur was due to hold further talks this week with the Inter-American Development Bank in order to speed up the drafting of legal regulations to enable the reopening of the market.
The government representative acknowledged that the recent decision in the US courts that paves the way for Argentina to begin making debt repayments to its international creditors had smoothed the way for the trade negotiations.
Argentina is the world’s leading producer of fresh lemons with a crop of almost 1.5m tonnes per year, about 80 per cent of which comes from Tucumán. In 2015 the country exported 185,000 tonnes of lemons with a value of US$165m. The main destinations were the Netherlands, Russia and Spain.
The US suspended Argentina lemon exports in 2001 after Californian producers filed a lawsuit against the USDA claiming they were a threat to local production. Since then, Argentina has worked intensively to regain access to the market by showing that its lemons pose no phytosanitary risks.
President Mauricio Macri seized last month’s visit by Barack Obama to Argentina –the first official trip by an American leader in two decades – as an opportunity to ramp up pressure to secure the reopening of the market.
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