The European Commission is poised to scrap plans to harmonise EU apple sizing standards with the rest of the world.
While an EC management committee still has to agree officially to rescind its earlier recommendation to bring the EU standard in line with the UN/ECE standard, English Apples & Pears’ Adrian Barlow believes that is a mere formality.
European growers, led by a vociferous UK lobby, felt that the harmonisation of standards would open up the market to unscrupulous operators prepared to try their luck with immature, inferior quality fruit. The standards were due to converge on August 1.
“This is great news for both the industry and consumers,” Barlow told the Journal. “Enforcement of the new regulation would have had a considerable negative effect on the marketing of apples in Europe.”
The minimum sizes would have dropped to 60mm (from 65mm) for larger fruiting varieties, and, for class II fruit, opportunities would have emerged for apples as small as 50mm.
UK growers in particular feared that large volumes of cheap, small-sized Granny Smith and Golden Delicious could enter the market and compete on price with home-grown Cox.
The EU apple industry was almost unanimously in favour of rejecting the plan, and, said Barlow, growers across the continent will be “tremendously relieved” at the probable outcome of their protests.
“This is fantastically important news for the UK industry,” said Barlow. “And we must take an awful lot of credit for leading the process.”
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