"Pesticide-laced tangerines were buried" - Gjeçi: We have denounced the failure to follow the procedure
Three people have been arrested in Berat, after the city's Prosecutor's Office suspected them of selling 10 tons of pesticide-laced tangerines that had been returned from Croatia to the Albanian market. But in an interview with SCAN TV, the Director of the Cabinet of the Minister of Agriculture, Ermira Gjeçi, revealed that the tangerines returned from Croatia were not put on the market for consumption, but were buried. According to her, the case was reported by the institutions under the Ministry of Agriculture.
"On December 10, a quantity of clementine mandarins was blocked by the Croatian authorities, destined for export. And it is suspected of being residues of two products that are not on the approved list of the Ministry of Agriculture. The story begins with the denunciation made by our subordinate institutions, the institutions of the Ministry of Agriculture, for the case in question. And here we are dealing with a violation of the procedure. So we are not dealing with the dumping of a product on the market as is widely reported in the media. It is about a violation of the procedure, since the procedure requires that at the moment the load that is destined for export is blocked, then immediately upon arrival the operator is obliged, based on the legislation in force, to inform the responsible institutions, which in this case is the AKU, which has its own procedure for the destruction of this quantity so that we can guarantee that this quantity does not end up on the market. This procedure was not followed. The operator returned the load to the farmer and the farmer buried it. This has resulted from the administrative investigation that was carried out by our subordinate institutions. The case was denounced by our subordinate institutions themselves for non-implementation of the legislation in force. So in this case we are dealing with the unauthorized use of pesticides and failure to follow legal procedures.
The Ministry of Agriculture says that representatives of the AKU were not part of the burying of the tangerines, but the case was investigated and their burial was verified.
"He was not part of the team that dealt with the burial and this is the reason why the case was taken for criminal prosecution, because the procedure requires that the Ministry be notified and the ministry is part of the team that does the burial. But going back to the chain of control, that is, to traceability, this is the traceability that we say, I myself go back to the primary point, to the first point, it was seen, it was declared by the farmer and the burial site was seen. As for further results, as you are aware, the case is under investigation, so we cannot give more information until it is completed. But the burial site is verified with a protocol.
The Ministry of Agriculture announces that a task force has been set up to analyze every positive case, whether from imports or domestic products. According to this institution, only 4 shipments have tested positive out of 923 in total.
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