Rob:  When Americans buy their produce from the Middle East, most all of it comes from Israel.  From farmers like Avi Pincus who gets top dollar for the mangos and bananas he grows in the Gallilee Hills.
Avi Pincus:  We have to increase our quality.  We try to be competitive through the arriving at higher quality fruit and not necessarily growing more.
Rob:  Such concerns are more than marketing, it also insures the safety of the food grown here.  From the field, the mangos go to a packing plant that’s off limit to strangers and has almost daily government inspections, even from the Israeli secret service.
Cliff Lahav:  We have to do it.  We’re not choosing to do it because we want to do it; we have to do it.
Rob:  Cliff Lahav works for the Israeli government and says nowhere else is food tracked as closely as it is here.
Lahav:  The fruit is packed, it’s bar coded on the cartons from which grower.  When it gets to the wholesale market, or the retail market, or wherever it is, whether it’s in Oklahoma City, whether it’s in Paris, France, if there’s a problem or something special with the fruit, the retailer or wholesaler or importer can get back to the packing house and say, okay, this is my bar code, and who’s fruit is it?  Let’s say we found residue over there, a certain chemical, and the packing house can say to this grower, hey, this is your fruit, you have residue level on your fruit.
Rob:  Across Israel the ministry of agriculture routinely checks for possible food terrorism, testing samples from a thousand farms each year, looking for toxins, pathogens, and dangerous levels of pesticides.  Work that Lahav says does increase cost, but in the long run keeps Israel’s $3½ billion agricultural industry not only viable, but profitable.
Lahav:  It is a success, let’s say, on the farmer level, because he’s more orderly.  He’s recording.  He’s thinking.  This is an added on value to this system.
Rob:  So the bottom line?  While the Israelis say their exports to the U S are some of the safest in the world, it’s certainly not by accident.