BRUSSELS/CAIRO: The European Union has voted to ban imports of all seeds and beans from Egypt until Oct. 31, after a batch of fenugreek seeds from the country was cited as the most likely source of recent E. coli outbreaks in Europe. However, an article published in state-owned daily Al-Ahram Tuesday morning quoted a statement by Agriculture Minister Ayman Abu Hadid, who claimed that the European Commission had stated that the Egyptian seeds were not the cause of the E-coli outbreak. He added that all the investigations carried out by the German government had tested negative, emphasizing the fact that Egypt has not had a single case of E. coli infection. He also said that all batches of the Egyptian seed exported in 2009 were subjected to four different agricultural quarantines before reaching their final destination. No trace of the bacteria was found. On Friday, Egypt's ministry of agriculture denied that fenugreek seeds exported to Europe had caused the E.coli outbreak. The head of Egypt's Central Administration of Agricultural Quarantine, Ali Suleiman, said claims by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that Egyptian fenugreek seeds exported in 2009 and 2010 may have been implicated in the outbreak were "completely untrue." "The presence of this bacteria in Egypt has not been proven at all, and it has not been recorded," Suleiman told the official MENA news agency. He said the Egyptian company that exported the seeds in 2009 has stressed in a letter that it had exported the fenugreek to Holland and not to Germany, Britain or France. Yet the report by EU investigators on Tuesday linked the imported seeds to two E. coli outbreaks that infected more than 4,100 people — one centered in northern Germany that killed 49 people, and a second focused on the French city of Bordeaux. "The report published today leads us to withdrawing some Egyptian seeds from the EU market and to a temporary ban on imports of all seeds and beans originating from that country," EU health commissioner John Dalli said in a statement. All fenugreek seeds exported to Europe since 2009 by the Egyptian company identified as the source of the contaminated batch must be withdrawn, tested and destroyed, the Commission said, without identifying the company involved.
