Government officials in Paris have revealed that an unusual spike in kiwifruit supply towards the end of the domestic season alerted them to an apparent €6m scam involving six companies in France and at least one in Italy.
The consumer affairs agency Dgccrf said it was taking legal action against the companies after discovering around 15,000 tonnes of Italian kiwifruit had been mislabelled as French over the past three years.
That figure amounted to approximately 12 per cent of kiwifruit sold as domestic produce on the French market since 2016, it added.
A sudden surge in volumes towards the end of the French campaign is understood to have raised suspicions about what newspaper Le Parisien has dubbed 'kiwigate'.
“We said to ourselves, such large volumes at the end of season aren’t possible,” Adeline Gachein, director of the French kiwifruit organisation BIK, told the publication.
France's kiwifruit crop, which is currently around 50,000-55,000 tonnes, is not enough to satisfy a market that consumes around 80,000 tonnes per year. Italy, by contrast, produces a much larger crop, turning out roughly 430,000 tonnes in 2018.
According to the agency, lower production costs in Italy and higher market prices in France were two major factors in the alleged fraud. It also pointed to the use of certain 'active substances' – specifically fenexamide and fludioxonile – on Italian kiwifruit which, it said, rendered the imported fruit less competitive on the French market.
Giovanni Triolo of Sicilian company Casalmonaco questioned France's continued policy of banning Italian kiwifruit that had been treated in this way.
'In France, they justify a higher price for their product by talking about different labour costs and treatments that are not permitted, but they forget that Italy is not Asia but Europe, and is therefore subject to the same laws,' he told Italiafruit News.
'My advice would be to stop being lazy and to ask those who accuse us of poisoning our products to be more precise and communicate the names of the harmful products used.'
