In its most recently published test results, NZ Food Safety found that 2.7% of all food samples they tested had illegally high levels of pesticide residues.
They found eight different food samples, out of 300 tested, had agrichemical residues higher than the legal maximum – the Maximum Residue Limit (MRL).
But that is not how the NZFS reported their results: NZFS stated the “non-compliant test results are less than 0.01% of total test results reported.” At no point did NZFS mention that 2.7% of all the food samples they tested were found to contain illegally high levels of pesticide residues.
The way that NZFS described the test results is actually true, but it is misleading.
The trick they use is this: they test 300 samples of food for 500 different agrichemicals, which means that they do about 150,000 tests. Of those 150,000 tests ten came back with pesticide residues higher than the MRL (from eight different samples), which means that 10 in 150,000 results are non-compliant. That is how they can say that there are less than 0.1% non-compliant results.
However, as food eaters, what we want to know is whether the food we are eating and feeding our families has high levels of any pesticide – just one pesticide at illegally high levels is of concern.
The Govt is trying to allow 100 times more glyphosate residues on our food and rewrite the rulebook to fast-track more toxic agrichemicals into our food system.
Take ActionMost of us know that pesticides have caused terrible illness and death in the past and that chemical companies have known about the dangers and covered it up in order to maximise profits.
Hence we rely on government agencies to test the food, clearly present the results, and then act on the results. And that is where NZFA is failing.
NZFA are presenting the results in a way that obscures the answer to the question that most concerns consumers – does their food have illegally high levels of pesticides or not? The answer for about 3% of food tested, is yes it does.
But that’s not all – they don’t prosecute when they find illegal levels of pesticide residues.
Even when NZFS finds high levels of pesticides, well above legal limits, they do not prosecute. They found food with 36 times the legal limit for Methamidophos, a dangerous organophosphate which is now banned, on a crop that it was not authorised to be used on, and still they did not prosecute.
Even when seven companies were found to breach the law repeatedly, NZFA did not prosecute.
And a Greenpeace investigation revealed that they have not done a single prosecution since at least 2016.
And when they found levels of glyphosate residues at 50 times the legal limit, not only did they not prosecute, they simply stopped testing for it and have never tested for glyphosate residues since. In fact they now want to increase the glyphosate MRL by 100 fold.
And of course NZFS only tests 300 samples per year out of the billions of servings of food that people in New Zealand consume. This means that the chances of an agribusiness getting caught putting too much pesticide on a crop is close to zero. And in the vanishingly small chance that they get caught, they know that NZFA never prosecutes, even if they get caught repeatedly.
This means that there is no credible threat of regulatory enforcement of breaches of maximum residue limits of pesticides on food.
This is all going to get worse if the Government carries out its deregulation agenda for agrichemicals in New Zealand. Spearheaded by Act Party Ministers Andrew Hoggard and David Seymour, they are planning to accelerate the approval of all hazardous substances, allow industry to “self-assess” their dangerous chemicals, and establish a new fast-track process for pesticide approvals.
Sign the open letter calling on them to abandon this reckless plan.
