Is Indian rice high in pesticide residue levels?

NEW DELHI: A Hamburg-based lab, Eurofins, has alleged high levels of pesticide residue in Indian rice, basmati and non basmati. This is likely to start a long-drawn legal battle and for the time being jeopardise around $300m in basmati exports alone to Europe.

The first batch of legal correspondence from the grain traders, a precedent to formal legal action, will be exchanged with the Hamburg-based private testing firm, Eurofins and Dr Speck Laboratories before September.
“Funding for the legal proceedings is likely to be the least of problems,” an industry official said as the $30m Basmati Development Fund (BDF) can fund the legal defence.

IPR lawyers K&S Partners have been hired in India by the national platform of rice exporters, the All India Rice Exporters Association (AIREA), for what now threatens to be a high stakes battle.

Eurofins and Dr Speck Laboratories will, industry honchos said, likely be charged on two levels, corporate and personal. “Some sort of a corporate case will be filed in Brussels and a personal liability case will be filed in Hamburg against the directors of Eurofins,” said an AIREA official.

“They have been unable to satisfy us that they had requisite accreditation under Sanco 10684 and ISO 17025 norms,” he added.

The first refers to method (of testing for pesticide residue) validation and the second with the obligations that testing lab is expected to fulfil for conducting the tests in question.

Towards June end, the European lab had issued reports to buyers suggesting that Indian rice has elevated levels (0.03%) of carbedenzum and isoprothiolane (both plant protection products and PPP), after the European Commission fixed an arbitrary Maximum Residue Level (MRL) of 0.01 ppm.

Last month, rice exporters hoped to resolve the vexed issue out of court through a personal meeting with the head of Eurofins Werner Nader here in Delhi.

The bigger question, though, is the issue of why the EC reduced pesticide levels in the first place and the data and scientific evidence that prompted it to reduce the MRL for the plant protection products (ppp) or pesticides, something that rice exporters from India failed miserably to address.

A government official maintained that the two issues, of the Eurofins test results and that of the EC reducing pesticide residue levels for imported rice, should not be clubbed together.

“That latter is a larger issue that could be discussed separately between the two governments at an appropriate stage,” a government official said.

Interestingly, wherever it has growing interest, the EC has relaxed the MRL for the same pesticides such as in the case of wheat where high levels of carbedenzum residue beyond prescribed levels have been accepted.

That the EC was planning to bring down the Maximum Residue Level (MRL) for pesticide (carbedenzum and isoprothiolane MRL were brought down to 0.01 ppm) was apparent as far back as five years ago. After the formal reduction of MRL around a year ago, the development was brought to the notice of India’s rice exporters to Europe.