Information for fruit and vegetables business in CIS
Russia agrees to lift British seed potato import ban to help farmers
The ban on the import of British fruit and vegetables to Russia, over the Ukraine crisis, has been partially lifted in order to allow British seed potatoes to be exported to Russia.
Russia imposed a ban on Russia banned all US and EU meat, fish, dairy, fruit and vegetables in response to western sanctions imposed on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis. The ban also affected Australia, Canada and Norway.
However, VoR has learned that an agreement has been reached to lift the ban on seed potatoes imported into Russia from Britain, because of a need for the vegetables in seed to enable growth of crops locally.
Robert Burns, head of seed and export at Potato Council told VoR: “We had actually hoped to grow this market and we had an awful lot of interest from Russia for new varieties of potato that we had hoped to export.”
He said the lifting of the ban was a tremendous relief.
“This now opens the doorway to negotiate, and opens up the market to much larger tonnage. We have one of the largest high-health EU status areas within the EU. The whole of Scotland is covered by what’s called a ‘high-health designated area’, so the quality of the seed that’s coming out of that area is significantly higher than other parts of Europe.
“We’re certainly looking to the long term plan, in terms of exports to Russia. Although there are political problems at the moment, we’re hoping that these will be resolved and we’re looking for a long-term solution for our exporters and also for the farmers in Russia to be able to import good quality seeds and novel varieties which they very much need.“
He said Russia was always in need of different varieties of seed potatoes because of its complex climate.
"That is the problem with Russia. The climate is very fickle and in bad years they can have tremendous shortfalls on both eating potatoes and seed potatoes the following season. And this is where we can capitalise. Being a maritime climate here in Britain, we have a fairly steady climate and we can almost guarantee what our seed outputs are going to be in any particular season. And we have a huge catalogue of varieties many of which are very adapted for the Russian climate."