The export sector of fresh fruits and vegetables from ACP countries faces serious difficulties. These stem from a) the harmonisation of European regulations on pesticide residues and b) the increasing requirements of European distribution companies that want to reassure customers of the quality and safety of the products they sell.
It is essential that exporters from ACP growers bring their products up to a standard that conforms with the EU’s regulatory and commercial requirements as soon as possible. Failure to do so would put market share at risk, threatening an important source of earnings for the ACP countries, the existence of many producers and the jobs of a large number of those employed by the sector.
It would also bring into peril the supply of a number of fresh produce lines now taken for granted by the EU marketplace and change the face of exporting and importing tropical and minor crops around the globe. At the request of the ACP states, the PIP was established by the EU to forestall any negative effects on the affected export trade sector and to assure the long-term sustainability of growers and exporters. Some e28.8 million has been invested in the five-year programme to assist enterprises of all sizes in adopting systems for food safety management and product traceability. The PIP aims to contribute to the development of sustainable trade between responsible partners.
“The decision to implement PIP,” says Guichard, “demonstrated the desire of the European Commission and ACP countries that the sector should define its own expectations and that the programme should be focused on private companies.”
The programme is in line with the three guiding principles of the ACP-EU Cotonou Agreement, in that it supports the development of the ACP private sector, attempts to alleviate poverty and promotes regional integration when solutions are more efficient at a regional level.
The logic of PIP’s interventions is not based on the distribution of subsidies, but rather as a response to requests submitted by private companies or groups of companies. These interventions involve the implementation of support for food safety initiatives, the staff training needed for such initiatives and the implementation of traceability systems, among other things. Costs are shared between the programme and the beneficiaries - with the level of support higher when the intervention assists the more vulnerable groups, such as small scale producers.
Additionally, PIP aims to ensure that the specific needs of tropical and minor crops are taken into account in the ongoing regulatory harmonisation process in the EU. It also looks to build the local capacity needed for sustainable development of the sector, strengthening the structure of local expertise, information systems and laboratory capacity etc, to enable the work to continue effectively once the PIP intervention ends.
The task at the outset was no small one, covering hundreds of exporting countries and several tens of thousands of small producers in 35 ACP countries. Therefore, a management unit set up in Brussels selected five pilot countries (Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Jamaica and Zimbabwe) and seven pilot crops (pineapple, green beans/mange tout, mangoes, papaya, avocados, passionfruit and okra) with a view to gradual expansion.
Intervention request forms were made available in October 2001, and from November of the same year the first missions were carried out to meet potential beneficiaries, with the assistance of local experts. In 2002, priority moved on to establishing contacts with individual companies.
Guichard, of course, has been heavily involved at all stages and is now able to report considerable success. “By February 2004, 30 months into the 60-month programme, PIP’s management unit had registered 160 intervention applications,” she says. “More than 110 have come from private companies, 20 from professional organisations and around 30 from other intermediary structures.” Of these, 74 applications have already led to the establishment of a “memorandum of understanding” with COLEACP.
“Around 480,000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables are exported annually from ACP countries to the EU (not including bananas or South Africa). The cumulative volumes of the companies involved to date amounts to 260,000t, which means the PIP actions are already putting the conformity process into practice for about 50 per cent of the sector’s trade flows.”
All types and sizes of companies have submitted intervention applications to PIP, from market leaders to small-scale producers. Of the original five pilot countries, only Zimbabwe has failed to interact, for obvious political reasons. Outside of the initial targets, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mali and Madagascar have all become involved.
To the list of pilot products can be added cherry tomatoes, melons, yams and chilli peppers, as PIP reaches outside its early parameters and takes in a growing breadth of the ACP product base. PIP’s financial commitments currently amount to e4.9 million, an average of e90,000 per applying enterprise, or equivalent to 61 per cent of total costs.
The programme is beneficial to all levels of companies, but the assistance it can provide to small growers is invaluable, particularly in view of the constraints being placed on them by EU legislation and demands. “Regulations and requirements are changing very fast in the EU, but implementation of the necessary changes in ACP countries cannot move at the same pace,” explains Guichard. “For smallholders it requires heavy investment to bring themselves fully into line with EU demands. Any grower that is supplying crops to the EU already is taking great care of those products, but traceability requirements are more difficult to achieve in countries where the supply base is highly segregated. There is a need for supervisory central bodies to ensure quality control and food safety issues are met.”
The pan-EU harmonisation of Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) throws up more dilemmas. Guichard says: “With MRLs set at the level of detection when the necessary trials have not taken place, any exceedence will exclude certain products from the marketplace. Criminal penalties and naming and shaming policies for buyers who sell “contaminated” products have simplified their attitude and mean the regulations have to be adhered to. There is no direct financial penalty for the exporter, but the consequences are much bigger - business will be lost.”
The concerns are bigger for producers and exporters of minor crops, because until now the research work to set MRLs has not been carried out. The setting of MRLs at zero represents a massive threat to the balance of supply from ACP countries, and to the economic prosperity of those nations.
There is widespread scepticism surrounding European MRL legislation, not just because work so far has largely ignored exotic products, but also because there appears to be a lack of willingness to understand the importance of local conditions to the setting of appropriate standards. “PIP has acted on regulations in ACP countries concerning the use of pesticides and control of active substances. With the support of DG Sanco, the programme’s technical teams have been collecting data on a number of products grown within the ACP to check the residue potentials and develop crop protocols,” says Guichard. “Now in our third year of doing this, we are beginning to obtain the meaningful data. Several crop protocols are now ready, for avocados, green beans, cherry tomatoes, papayas and pineapples. These will allow us to work at institutional level to advise the EU for instance on the appropriate levels to set. Throughout 2002 and 2003, meetings were organised with regulatory authorities such as the European Commission’s DG Health and Consumer Affairs.”
PIP has also succeeded in drawing the attention of big chemical companies to the potential problems facing minor crops. “We have signed partnership agreements with several large chemical companies to share the costs of trials, whereby the manufacturers would provide the chemicals and we would conduct the institutional work,” says Guichard.
CropLife international, an organisation which brings together all international pesticide manufacturers’ associations, has signed an agreement, and manufacturers such as Syngenta, Dupont, Dow, Bayer and BASF will carry out the field trials in order to prepare a series of Tolerance Import dossiers. “The first field trials have already been carried out in Senegal and they are now spreading around the ACP. The results will give growers the confidence to use certain pesticides knowing that they will fall inside the MRL parameters and that they are working on a level playing field with producers in other regions of the world,” Guichard says.
Therefore, PIP can genuinely now claim to be a major source of information for stakeholders on regulatory matters relating to fruit and vegetable exports to the EU. As mentioned earlier, it is also prioritising the guarantee of continued sustainability after its conclusion. To this end, strengthening the capacity of local production companies is a necessary step to which the PIP has granted a sizeable proportion of its expenses.
The support structure for each ACP county’s fruit and vegetable sector is a crucial factor and to date the PIP has committed e1.9m to the reinforcement of professional organisations and enhancement of the quality of local public and private services. “These aspects have to be improved to meet the needs of enterprises and the constant changes they face in export markets,” says Guichard.
Task forces have been formed in participating countries, set up and supported by the PIP as one of its primary functions. Each PIP task force is a framework for consultation that brings together PIP partners who directly deal with issues relating to compliance with EU regulations - from both the public and private sectors. They have been set up in Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and Jamaica, while the building blocks are in place for task forces in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mauritius and Uganda.
Sixteen capacity-building agreements are already being implemented and a further 15 intervention requests are being reviewed by PIP’s Capacity Building Component. The programme is also developing synergies with other programmes that support the private sector and with the national and regional indicative programmes that exist.
Guichard says that progress in the first 30 months of PIP has been encouraging, but there is still a long way to go. Whether all internal objectives are met by July 2006 or not though, the ACP fresh produce grower and exporter would be in a yet more difficult position without the assistance they are being offered.
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