It is a statement that challenges and a worrying critical analysis that has just been published by the consumer association UFC-What to choose. According to a document posted online on Thursday March 24, of the 14,000 official health checks carried out on food sold in France, more than half of the fruits and vegetables fromagriculture intensive are contaminated with risk pesticides. The products mentioned might be carcinogenic, have effects on reproduction or DNA or are known to be endocrine disruptors.
In detail, the study published by UFC-Que Choisir reveals that 51% of fruits and vegetables checked contain traces of a risky pesticide and 30% of them show traces of at least two pesticides risk.
For example, 27.4% of the grapefruits examined show traces of pyriproxyfen, suspected of being an endocrine disruptor and of having contributed to malformations of the head and brain in Brazil.
Watch out for the cherries
The foods most at risk are apples, where 80% of the samples are contaminated in particular by fludioxonil (48% of the samples), a fungicide suspected of being an endocrine disruptor, as well as cherries where 92% of the samples show traces of risk pesticides and in particular phosmet (47%), a insecticide suspected by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) of having effects on reproduction.
⋙ Launch of an annual monitoring of 75 pesticides in ambient air
To avoid these risky products, the UFC-Que Choisir points out that organic foods are much less contaminated than their industrial counterparts, in particular because of the ban on synthetic pesticides in these crops.
Only one sample out of ten in organic thus presents traces of risk pesticides once morest 6 out of 10 in conventional, organic green beans contain seven times less, and eight times less for apples.
And in the rare cases where products from theorganic farming are contaminated, the levels recorded for pesticides are much lower than for intensive agriculture.
An overly lax regulatory framework
A data underlined by the consumer association which welcomes the possibility for the most vulnerable consumers to these molecules such as pregnant women, children or adolescents to be able to consume safer products, but it considers that it is “inadmissible to having to force consumers to switch to a more expensive offer, while these worrying global findings are the result of a particularly lax regulatory framework”.
⋙ Derogations from pesticide spreading distances challenged by the Constitutional Council
Because the UFC-Que Choisir also points to the health checks carried out on fruits and vegetables which do not make it possible to guarantee the absence of risks in food, the checks only taking into account the maximum limits of authorized residues while certain substances can be harmful to health, even at very low doses.
Faced with this observation and the omnipresence of high-risk pesticides in food, the consumer defense association calls for a strengthening of the regulatory framework in France and in Europe, in particular by reviewing the authorization procedures for products in the cultivation of fruit and vegetables, by establishing better identification of compounds that are carcinogenic, mutagenic or endocrine disruptors and by immediately prohibiting the marketing and use of the molecules most at risk “in application of the precautionary principle”.
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