The producers fear that this will become a habit. Three months after “the case of the kiwi Italian”, it’s the turn of strawberry French be pointed. A deal a lesser extent, however, holds nuance Xavier Mas, the president of the Association of organisations of producers (PDO) a national of the cutter, which brings together some thirty farmers. It is the producer of the Lot-et-Garonnes (the first French department production of strawberries), which has contacted the services of the fraud in march to report the discovery of a few pallets of strawberries are supposed to be French, and who were in reality Spanish, within a co-operative of the department. “This is the first time that we have to deal with it,” stalling, Xavier Mas, but it is important not to that it becomes a habit”.
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If the AOP is not intended to control the origin of strawberries, “there is regularly, directly in points of sale,” says Xavier Mas. “In this specific case, it is an employee of the organization that is spent in a supermarket in Agen. She was arrested by strawberries marked original Lot-et-Garonne, but that really did not have the look of the ones that are usually grown in the department”, explains the producer. The AO, therefore, made in the cooperative to the origin of these strawberries and discovered “several pallets of strawberries Spanish”. According to Xavier Mas, “the co-op is not a priori culpable of fraud, it would itself have on the goods.” It would, in effect, had recourse to an intermediary to complete his cargo of strawberries round, whose performance is still not fully optimal at this time of the year. According to Xavier Mas, it was well noted on the invoices, “origin France”. However, the president of the PDO considers that no conclusions can be made at the present time, “it will have to wait for the results of the investigation.”
A market structuring
it is Still the case that the AOP has decided to declare civil party, and to take the subject head-on-body. “The sector of the strawberry in French is currently in full-structuring,” says Xavier Mas, we are looking for a reliable traceability system in a market that is quite diffuse”. The producer points out that “the size of the farms is on average much lower than most other sectors, which makes the very complex organisation”. In this context, the PDO does not want to keeping the affair: “it is the Coordination of rural (agricultural union, editor’s note), which revealed the affair to the big day, while we would prefer to settle this in-house”, he laments.
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Even if it has reached “industrial” proportions there are already more than 50 years – the famous species gariguette was created in 1976 – the French market of the cutter has increased significantly in recent years, especially in the Lot-et-Garonne. In 2015, in the department of the south-west of France, there were about 200 producers, some 500 acres of production, including 220 hectares off the ground. Especially, “the market has increased due to a diversification of species produced and an overall improvement in the quality, allowing the strawberry French stand out from the neighbouring Spanish”, explains Xavier Mas. Therefore, “it is very important that it is reliable to consumers”, he insists, at the risk that lovers of strawberries turn to the products boundary, less expensive.
This case occurs so that the problem of the traceability of food products back more and more on the front of the stage. If the giants of the large distribution chains such as Carrefour took over the early of the topic, with the implementation of technology for product traceability, including through the blockchain, Xavier Mas confesses: “agriculture is still rather late on the subject. But we will eventually get there, too.’
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