Pesticide safety risk management in high value chains : the case of Turkey and Morocco

Fresh produce pesticides safety risks have grown during the last twenty years, into a major concern of north European consumers and governments. Although Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPC) consumers are not yet very demanding as regards to fresh produce safety, risks are significant and increasingly taken into consideration by MPC local governments and modern food chain operators. Product standards (Maximum Residue Limits) and more recently process standards (Good Agricultural Practices, GAP) have turned into the most efficient solution to control and reduce the level of pesticides on fresh produce. Defined by a variety of public and private actors, they are implemented and controlled at different levels of the chain by public and private actors as well. Accordingly, safety control has turned into a key issue for the development of MPC fresh produce export and local markets. Task 4 of Work Package 5 expands on safety control issues and give insights into how MPC fresh fruits and vegetables chains organise to comply with private and public, national and international safety standards and thus get access to export and modern domestic markets. The deliverable deals with food safety control in the MPCs or more precisely pesticide safety risk management in high value chains of Morocco and Turkey. More precisely, it aims at identifying and analyzing: the diversity of management schemes implemented by local growers to comply with public and private standards, both in the export and domestic high value chains; the economic, organisational, and institutional drivers of the diffusion of those standards in MPCs; the individual determinants of the adoption of specific pest management patterns and farm product certification.