Brussels, March 27 - Russia has ratcheted up trade tensions with the European Union on fruit and vegetable imports, demanding that countries sign separate deals in addition to a wider EU-Russia agreement from 2008, officials said on Friday.
This week, the EU's health chief warned the bloc's farm ministers they should guard against attempts at 'fragmentation' across the 27 member countries, in what some diplomats referred to as familiar 'divide and rule' tactics by Russia.
At least four EU countries have been asked by Moscow to sign up to bilateral arrangements with extra pesticide-related import standards that go beyond last year's EU-Russia agreement.
That agreement took months to negotiate and was supposed to end a lengthy row over pesticide residues in EU plant products, especially fruit and vegetables: a highly valuable export trade.
Italy brought the matter to the attention of farm ministers this week and has refused to sign -- as have the Netherlands, officials say. Lithuania faces pressure from Moscow to fall into line; Latvia is thought to have signed a bilateral deal already.
Revenue from fruit and vegetable products accounts for the lion's share of the value of EU farm exports to Russia, at around 1.6 billion euros ($2.17 billion) a year.
Apart from Russia threatening to suspend plant-based imports if a country does not sign, EU exporters also run the risk of being removed from a list of approved operators, officials say.
"The Russians are just playing power politics," one EU diplomat said.
"What they seem to be doing is trying to unpick that agreement by trying to persuade member states to sign up to more strict conditions bilaterally. So the European Commission wants to encourage countries not to do that," he said.
FAMILIAR TACTICS
The Commission, which administers food safety policy on behalf of EU countries and also negotiates such agreements with non-EU importer countries, insists the 2008 memorandum of understanding already properly governs plant exports to Russia.
Russia's animal and plant health watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor disagrees, saying the memorandum was only a framework agreement so separate arrangements are needed with EU suppliers.
"It happens that in different countries there exist different services responsible for the safety of fruit and vegetable products. And these services ... assume concrete responsibilities for supplies to Russia taking into account local specifications, laboratories," Rosselkhoznadzor spokesman Alexei Alexeyenko said.
"The agreement fixes concrete laboratories, which test the products for safety, in concrete supplier countries. Within the framework of the general agreement it is impossible to fix concrete details," he said.
The Commission says this approach goes against the spirit of the memorandum because responsibility would move from professional exporters to national authorities.
For seasoned EU officials, the tactic of targeting countries individually with complaints about safety standards, instead of dealing with central Brussels authorities, is rather familiar.
In 2005, Brussels averted a threatened blockade of all plant and vegetable exports to Russia -- everything from cut flowers and pot plants to seeds and potato starch -- by agreeing to replace national safety certificates with a single EU version.
The row started with a Russian import ban on vegetable products from particular countries -- Estonia, Germany and the Netherlands -- over a field pest, the Californian flower thrip.
A year earlier, Moscow blocked meat exports from a host of EU states including key producers Denmark, Ireland and France.
One guarantee for avoiding similar rows with Moscow in the future would be if Russia achieved its goal of joining the World Trade Organisation, something it has wanted for many years.
"That would be ideal. But we're not there yet. So we'll just have to carry on playing their games," the diplomat said.