Russia bans EU vegetables

Russia on Thursday banned the import of all fresh vegetables from the European Union because of fears over the E. coli outbreak. Seventeen people have died (all but one in Germany) and hundreds more taken ill

Earlier this week, Russia banned the import of vegetables from Germany and Spain, amid fears that the outbreak could have originated in Spanish cucumbers.

“The fresh vegetable import ban affecting all EU countries went into effect this morning,” Gennady Onishchenko, the head of Russia’s health and consumer protection agency, told Interfax, according to AFP.

He said vegetables already imported from the EU “will be seized across Russia.”

Russia is not really known for reacting quickly to issues of public safety (witness its response to last year’s deadly fires, for example). So why the move?

Banning food imports sometimes feels like a national pastime – everything from US chicken to EU meat has been a target in the past. As AFP notes: “While this has ostensibly been on health grounds, some critics have accused the authorities using this as a pretext to unfairly back Russian producers.”

Onishenko issued a typically passionate rant against the EU for failing to find the source of the outbreak.

“We’re implemeneting a ban because for the past month, the situation has not been taken under control. The source of the infection, how it’s transmitted, have not been identified,” he said. “The situation has sharply worsened in recent days, and that’s why we’ve been forced to implement these extremely unpopular measures.”

“Nine countries, more than 1,500 sick, 16 dead – how many more lives of EU citizens are needed so that finally EU’s national authorities really deal with this problem?” he told Gazeta.ru.