Copa and Cogeca have sent a letter to the EU Commission welcoming the move to extend support for EU fruit and vegetable growers to 2016 to alleviate the impact of the Russian ban on EU exports, while also calling for more products to be included in the measure.
“Fruit and Vegetable growers have suffered enormously from Russia’s export ban, seeing their main export market shot overnight,' said Copa-Cogeca secretary-general Pekka Pesonen. 'Prices have declined to unprecedented levels. We therefore welcome EU Commissioner Hogan’s swift decision to extend the support measures to 2016 to prevent prices from plummeting further.
'But we call for the measures to be strengthened,' he added. 'In particular, we urge the Commission to increase the list of products covered by the measure to include all fruit and vegetables that were previously exported to the Russian Federation. This includes persimmons, watermelons, melons, aubergines, and so on. We also call for the new rules to apply retroactively from 1 July since the previous measures ended already on 30 June”.
The proposed measures, which enable products to be withdrawn from the market and distributed freely to for example charities, non-food uses, green harvesting, are set to be released this week after President Putin confirmed that the export ban will continue until 2016.
