Source: Greenpeace Aotearoa
Documents released by Greenpeace today show that while the New Zealand Food Safety (NZFS) agency was telling the public that there were ‘no food safety concerns’ from the discovery of very high levels of organophosphate pesticide residues in food, the NZFS’s own internal risk assessments found that residue levels were double those that would cause significant health risks.
Greenpeace Aotearoa Executive Director Dr Russel Norman says, “New Zealand Food Safety was telling the public that the food was safe to eat but it was not, as their own internal risk assessment found. NZFS needs to explain why they misled the public as to the safety of the food samples.”
In 2022-2023 NZFS found the dangerous organophosphate pesticide methamidophos in silverbeet at 360 times the Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) and reassuredthe public that they ‘found no food safety concerns with the food samples tested.’ Methamidophos was not even authorised to be used on silverbeet let alone left as a residue at 360 times the MRL.
Greenpeace is today releasing the internal NZFS risk assessment that shows that there were significant health risks associated with the pesticide. We obtained the risk assessment after a 12 month OIA battle with NZFS.
The risk assessment states that the ‘Dietary exposure assessment of methamidophos residue detected in silverbeet sample identifies that the concentration is above the ARfD’ (p.16). The ARfD is the Acute Reference Dose, the amount a person can eat in a 24 hour period without appreciable health risk.
The pesticide residue was 106% of the ARfD for adults and 232% of the ARfD for children.
The internal risk assessment prepared for the NZFS concluded that this ‘means that a human health food safety risk for children cannot be excluded’. They concluded that just 64 grams of this silverbeet would be dangerous for a 23kg child eaten over a 24 hour period.
Dr Norman says, “Every parent across the nation would feel a chill going up their spine reading the internal risk assessment stating that their children were at risk from food highly contaminated with dangerous pesticides. Meanwhile the government agency responsible for protecting food safety was telling people that everything was safe. It wasn’t.”
“And it is more than just one food. The NZFS 2022-23 Food Residue Survey Programmefound illegally high pesticide residues in 9% of all food samples. Yet NZFS downplayed the results.
“We are facing a fundamental problem of regulatory capture. NZFS is a business unit of the Ministry of Primary Industries, whose job is to promote agribusiness profits and exports. It would be fundamentally at odds with its export goals for MPI to admit that NZ has a serious problem with pesticide residues in food.
“We have a serious problem with pesticide residues in our food. The NZFS 2022-23 Food Residue Survey Programmefound illegally high pesticide residues in 9% of all food samples. But instead of focusing on this high level of illegal residues, NZFS obfuscated the issue by stating that only 0.02% of all tests were non-compliant, because there are 500 tests done on each of the 300 food samples. The 0.02% figure was accurate but misleading as it suggested that only 0.02% of food had a problem, when actually it is one in 11 food samples that are illegally contaminated.
“NZFS protects agribusiness not food consumers. It is in the wrong ministry with the wrong mandate. NZFS should be disbanded and a proper food safety agency should be established inside the Ministry of Health. The new food safety agency needs to be given the job of protecting people from unsafe food, rather than protecting industry from unsafe publicity.”