1.5% of EU Foods “Clearly Exceed” Legal Limits for Pesticide Residues

13 Mar 2015 --- The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has announced that more than 97% of food samples it has evaluated contain pesticide residue levels that fall within legal limits. As part of its 2013 annual report on pesticide residues in food, it also found that 55% of samples were free of any detectable traces of these chemicals. The report includes the results for almost 81,000 food samples from 27 EU member states, Iceland and Norway.

The 29 countries involved all carried out two monitoring programmes for the report: a national programmed designed by each of the countries as well as an EU-coordinated programme under which all food control authorities monitor the same ‘basket’ of food products. A combined total of 80,967 samples of a wide variety of processed and unprocessed food products were tested for the presence of 685 pesticides.

The findings also includes the fact that 97.4% of samples fell within legal limits, 54.6% were free of detectable residues, 1.5% clearly exceeded the legal limits while residues of more than one pesticide (multiple residues) were found in 27.3% of samples.

The majority of samples (68.2%) were taken from food originating in Europe, with 27.7% coming from food imported from third countries. The percentage of samples from third countries exceeding legal limits was higher (5.7%) than for EU countries (1.4%). However, exceedance rates for imported food have fallen by nearly two percentage points (from 7.5%) since 2012.

For the EU co-ordinated programme, the reporting states tested 11,582 samples from 12 food products – apples, head cabbage, leek, lettuce, peaches, rye, oats, strawberries, tomatoes, cow’s milk, swine meat and wine. The results showed that 99.1% of the samples contained residue levels within permissible limits and almost 53% contained no measurable residues.

Compared with the results for 2010, when the same food products – excluding wine – were tested, the percentage of samples exceeding the legal limits has fallen for all food products tested.

EFSA used the data from the EU co-ordinated programme to assess whether current dietary exposure to pesticide residues presented a risk to human health in the long term (chronic) or short term (acute). The Authority concluded that the presence of pesticide residues in food was unlikely to have a long-term effect on consumer health. For short-term exposure, the risk of European citizens being exposed to harmful levels of residues via their diet was rated as low.