Civil Guard agents belonging to the Nature Protection Service (Seprona) have seized a total of 1,350 kilos of vegetables and fruit during the inspection of several wholesale distributors in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Seprona carries out these inspections periodically to control the production processes of vegetable products such as fruit and vegetables that are marketed in the Canary Islands with the aim of ensuring the quality and good condition of the products.
Thus, during the inspections, the agents were able to verify that they did not have the phytosanitary certification of the plant products for their introduction in the Canary Islands, since, in the invoices provided, the lots and boxes in which they were intended to be marketed did not appear and, furthermore, , or they lacked the corresponding identification labels or the labels were erroneous as they did not coincide with the indicated product.
For this reason, it was impossible to prove the origin of the food, which has as its main objective to guarantee safe food consumption to protect the public health of consumers.
According to these facts, the agents intervened a total of 1,365 kilos of fruit and vegetables -1,159.4 kilos of tomatoes, 96.8 kilos of red peppers and 109.1 kilos of avocados–which has already been made available to the competent administrative and sanctioning authorities in the matter.
In this way, the owners of the establishments were notified of a total of six sanction proposals, three of them for infraction of Law 43/2002, of November 20, on plant health, for not being able to demonstrate the origin of the food products that were intended to be introduced into the commercial circuit for human consumption and three others for violation of Law 17/2011 on food safety and nutrition due to the absence of documentation or records or the lack of essential data to demonstrate the traceability of food.
