Date:10/01/2004 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2004/01/10/stories/2004011004071200.htm

National

Laxity in fixing safety norms for food articles: CSE

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, JAN. 9. After raising a furore over the presence of pesticides in soft drinks, the Centre for Science and Environment has come now out with a report alleging laxity in fixing pesticide safety standards for other food articles also.

The report said that the calculations conducted by the Centre had revealed pesticide residues in food articles exceeding the safety limits by 100 to 6,000 per cent in different cases. This was mainly because the regulation on pesticide residues in the country was not based on the concept of acceptable daily intake (ADI), the most rational method.

The ADI was the amount of a particular pesticide that could be ingested daily over a lifetime without any health risks and since children were the most vulnerable, the ADI estimation was always done in terms of the body weight. However, the regulators, while registering new pesticides, were not ensuring that the maximum residue levels (MRL) that could be allowed in different food commodities remained below the safety threshold, the report alleged.

Sunita Narain, Director, CSE, said: "Even the setting of MRL at the time of registration is not compulsory. Out of the 180-odd pesticides registered, MRLs have been set for only 71 — about 40 per cent".

But more than anything else, she said, these standards had been reduced to a farce as there was no enforcement. The pesticide residue monitoring programme was under the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the agency had found that in about 20 per cent of the samples, the residue levels exceeded the standards. But, the data was not used for enforcement. Rather, it was treated as a "classified secret", with no report of the project being published since 1999.

Emphasising that there was an urgent need to review the entire regulatory system, Ms. Narain said that lack of adequate standards for essential food commodities could not, however, be an alibi for not having standards for non-essential products such as soft drinks.

The pesticide residue norms for such products would have to be equally stringent and tough.

The report, published in the latest issue of the Centre's magazine, Down to Earth, suggested a road map for updating the food regulations based on the imperatives of maintaining good health.