97% of pesticide levels in Europe’s food legal, says EU agency

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A new report by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has found that more than 97% of foods contain pesticide residue levels that fall within legal limits. Strawberries are the most likely to exceed safe limits, the agency found. About 55% of the samples evaluated by EFSA were free of detectable traces of these chemicals, the agency said. This means nearly half of food products in Europe contain residues of pesticides. The highest rate of exceeding safety limits was for strawberries (2.5% of the sample), followed by lettuce (2.3%). They are especially sensitive to fungus and bugs and so undergo considerable spraying with pesticides. The European Crop Protection Association (ECPA), a trade group representing the pesticides industry, hailed the EFSA report, saying it “confirms once again that Europe’s food supply is among the safest in the world.” In a statement, ECPA said traces of pesticides exceeding the maximum residue levels (MRLs) were found more often in imported food (5.7%) than in samples originating from the EU and the European Economic Area (1.4%). The EFSA report was based on almost 81,000 food samples collected from 27 EU member states, Iceland and Norway. Participating countries carried out two monitoring programmes for the report. A national programme designed by each country, and an EU-coordinated program under which all national food control authorities monitor the same kinds of food products. EFSA said 1.5% of the samples clearly exceeded the legal limits, even when measurement uncertainty was taken into account. The Parma-based agency said the results had triggered legal or administrative sanctions against the food business operators responsible. More than one in four (27.3%) of the food samples contained traces of more than one pesticide. But health and environment organisations pointed out that EFSA did not examine the combined effects on humans of several pesticides residues. Toxicologists refer to this as the “cocktail effect”. “Providing statistics of single residue level in food is too simplistic,” said Martin Dermine of Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe, a green campaign group. “While 97% of food consumed across the EU does not exceed Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) for pesticides, the total number of residues found in food has grown in the past years, which is worrying as little is known about the combined effects of pesticides on human health,” Dermine said. Tatiana Santos, a senior policy officer for Chemicals at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a network of green NGOs, believes EFSA should revise MRLs downwards because setting maximum limits is “highly theoretical” in her view. “The only statistic that EFSA should be using to talk about the safety of food is the ‘zero residue’ figure,” Santos claimed. EFSA responded to the criticism in an email to EurActiv. It said that a full cumulative risk assessment was not included in the scope of the report. “However, from EFSA’s assessment of exposure to single residues, and based on experience gained from the previous year’s report, we consider it unlikely that exposure to multiple residues present in products such as strawberries will lead to acute health concerns,” the agency replied. “EFSA is currently working on the full cumulative risk assessment, which will look at possible chronic health effects and will be based on samples from 2011, 2012 and 2013,” it said.

Euractiv, 13 March 2015 ;http://www.euractiv.com/ ;