Approximately 3 and a half tons of red peppers from Albania will be buried in Serbia. On January 17, before the exporter Rrapi Hazizi sent the truck with various vegetables to Serbia, he performed their quality analysis in an accredited laboratory.
On January 19, Serbian authorities decided to re-scan the truck with vegetables, which showed that the red peppers had a high pesticide content.
Agronomists say that the more time passes, the easier it is for the active ingredient of the pesticide to dissolve, but strangely the second analysis done in Serbia showed the opposite.
Although the exporter requested a re-analysis of the product in another EU country, the request was rejected by Serbian officials, as a result of which the decision was made to bury the peppers.
Rrapi Hazizi: We were not worried about why the Serbian state asked for analysis, it will normally reqiure the best for their consumers, but when we took another analysis, the result couildn’t be higher than the first analysis. But what has hurt us the most is that when we asked for analysis in another country like Italy or Greece, we were surprised that communication was cut off.
Journalist: Do you think this action was biased?
Rrapi Hazizi: No, I think it was probably a mistake.
Journalist: According to the agreement of Open Balkan, our phyto-sanitary certificates should be recognized in Serbia as well, so what happened that they did not trust the analysis you did in Albania?
Rrapi Hazizi: They did not trust us even though we had done the tests in an accredited laboratory.
The economic damage done to the exporter Rrapi Hazizi amounts to 9 thousand euros. He adds that after the event, the Albanian Ministry of Agriculture contacted the Serbian Ministry of Agriculture, to ask for correctness in the food checks for Albanian agricultural products.
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