Pesticide residues in food - An explosive cocktail

Residue monitoring throughout Europe reveals a worrying trend:

More and more foodstuffs are contaminated with various residues of pesticides. Especially in fruit and vegetables, the figures give a clear trend towards multiple residues. Scientists are still quarrelling about the risks linked to these cocktails, but ever more signs for cumulative and synergistic effects between pesticide residues are on the record.

Toxicologists are used to examine the effects of single substances, and to assess their safety in an isolated setting. However it is obvious, that substances with a similar mode of desired action on the field can also cumulate in their undesired toxic effects on our plate. But not only science, also the legislation designed to protect the consumers does not sufficiently take such combined effect into account.

According to NGOs like Greenpeace, the residues detected in regular monitoring, serious enough, only show the tip of the iceberg: More than half of the pesticides currently used are not visible with the normally used analytic methods.  Furthermore, laboratory tests only detect roughly half of the harmful substances in food. Of the 1350 pesticides globally used only about 400 are well known and detected by chemical analytic methods.

These residues are not inevitable: Organic farmers do not use chemical pesticides at all. And numerous conventional farmers, who have subscribed to pesticide reduction programmes, prove that pesticides are only a last resort in a serious of measures of careful crop protection. Provided that adapted crop varieties are chosen, that the soil is kept healthy through sustainable crop rotation and that the benefits of predators are used, pesticide use can be substantially reduced or even avoided.

The Greens/EFA call for

• strong authorisation criteria for pesticides: toxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic substances must be taken off the market
• pesticides shall only be authorised if a practicable method for detecting it in food and in the environment is available
• compulsory programmes for the reduction of pesticide use shall be put in place in all member states
• toxicological assessment must be oriented at the most vulnerable groups: children and the unborn are most at threat during the development of the nervous and the immune systems

See :

• Report on the placing of plant protection products on the market
• Pesticides Action Network - Europe
• Greenpeace studies (also available in EN)
• MDRGF