The controversial Resolution No. 37/16 of Senasa caused concern among citrus producers and packers, because of the restrictions embodied in the document, which prevented the free movement of unprocessed fruit between the Argentine Coast and the northern part of the province of Buenos Aires, in order to prevent the spread of HLB. This forced the Executive of San Pedro to intervene and hold meetings with producers, packer representatives, provincial, and national officials, to achieve a significant advance in the province of Salta.
Silvio Corti, the Secretary of Government of San Pedro, and Horacio Frangi, the vice president of Caproem, participated in one of these meetings and stated that they had taken an important step forward. The members of the HLB program Executive Committee, which included leaders from the NEA and NOA productive areas, as well as authorities from the Inta and Senasa, also attended the meeting.
“Senasa could change the resolution,” said Corti. “What we achieved was eliminating the 90 days time limit given by the resolution to work with the current protocol. This meant that, after a 90 day period, transporting unprocessed fruit was prohibited, so it had to be processed in origin,” he added. This caused concern among packagers who announced it was possible that they would have to close their processing plants or move them to other provinces; either way, it meant more than 200 families would lose their jobs.
“The protocol will continue as it was being applied. Senasa will continue making controls at source, the trucks will be closed at source and will only be opened in San Pedro, where they will be checked again by Senasa, thus eliminating the possibility of HLB contagion,” Corti said. There will be a technical and scientific tryout in Salta to see if this protocol is effective, because representatives of other provinces, which are suspected to have lobbied for the signing of the resolution, have argued that the current procedure is not effective, although no indication of the presence of HLB was detected in the region.
“The only thing pending is the existence of the bubble sheds posed by the resolution,” said Corti, regarding the hygiene measures that the Senasa requires they adopt, which demand a significant financial investment. “They are still in the resolution, and the resolution is still in force, these are investments so that the sheds are airtight,” he added. Despite this progress, farmers have expressed their dissatisfaction regarding the bubble sheds because, according to them, if the procedure that is going to be tested works, there should be no need to implement these systems.
Corti said that they would communicate with Senasa authorities on Wednesday to make the requirements more flexible. Mfruit, one of the companies affected by the resolution, has started making investments to transform their packing facility into a bubble shed. In that sense, Corti stated: “It’s not the same for all producers, some of them have modern structures but others don’t. Depending on its structure, converting an old shed into a bubble shed could be very expensive”.
Source: Fresh Plaza