June 6 2008, 09:29

Agrarians of Ukraine take control over Turkish tomatoes

In June Ukrainian market may be flooded with Turkish vegetables, which are not quite ecologically safe, Segodnya informs. The thing is, these vegetables used to be supplied to Russia earlier; but, starting from June 7th Russian Agricultural Inspection bans the exports of Turkish products. Since the beginning of this year the labs of veterinarian-sanitary expertise of Russian Federation have detected 86 shipments of Turkish products with the excessive content of pesticides, nitrates and nitrites which may poison the organism if consumed. There were 4000 tons of cucumbers, tomatoes, egg-plants and lemons of Turkish origin; that is a quite great volume. According to the experts' evaluations, these vegetables will now be targeted at Ukrainian market. The analysts even admit that because of such great quantity of the products the prices for cucumbers and tomatoes may sharply decrease on $0.83-1.04/kg.

"The share of Turkish products in the supplies of the greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers has reached 80% in the period December till February", Andriy Yarmak says, the head of "Fruit-Inform" project. "I see no reasons to ban the imports of Turkish vegetables. There are mutually agreed safety standards; if the products meet these standards, there will be no basis to ban the imports".

According to the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, the nitrate content of the imported products is under strict control. They say, the labs of the veterinarian and sanitary expertise, working on each market, check each shipment which comes for the sales. However, the anonymous doctor of one of Kyiv labs told that the traders often cheat - they bring quality cucumbers for the analysis and sell other products which may have a high content of nitrates.