Strengthening of the Italian Research Infrastructure for Metrology and Open Access Data in support to the Agrifood
Pesticides, the risk in Europe is the combination of several contaminants
In recent weeks, the latest EFSA report on pesticide residues in food within the European Union was published, providing an overview of the levels of residues found in a range of commonly consumed products. We asked Massimo Reverberi, Full Professor of Plant Pathology at the Department of Environmental Biology at Sapienza University of Rome, to comment on it.
The document “THE 2022 EU REPORT ON PESTICIDE RESIDUE” details the levels of approximately 200 agrochemicals in a large number (about 100,000) of commonly consumed products and a subset (about 10,000) of selected products (i.e., apples, strawberries, peaches (including nectarines and similar hybrids), wine (red or white), lettuces, cabbages, tomatoes, spinach, oats, barley, cow's milk, and pork fat). It considers unprocessed, processed products, products from organic farming, third countries, and obviously EU countries. Furthermore, the data are compared with previous years of sampling (since 2020). It should be noted that the survey conducted in 2022 and the subject of this report includes the largest number of samples ever analyzed.
The picture that emerges is reassuring in some aspects, less so in others. In particular, both the large survey and the one restricted to the shortlist products show that the content of the various pesticides complies with legal limits (per pesticide) or matches them in more than 95% of cases (in 60% of these cases no pesticides are detected). The remaining samples only in 1% of cases have values of at least one pesticide exceeding the MRL (maximum residue level). This percentage is higher in processed foods (reaching around 5% and in some cases even more) and in products from third countries (on average 6%, but in some cases and for some pesticides even percentages greater than 20%).
The trend of reducing pesticides is in line with the 2020 and 2021 data. The number of samples with multiple pesticide residues (23%) has decreased compared to the previous year (26.4%), but in some products (i.e., raisins, red wine, cumin seeds as a dried herb, grape leaves, paprika powder, and "polished" rice) the frequency of finding multiple pesticides together has increased.
The problem is represented by the presence of multiple agrochemical residues, to which other harmful/toxic compounds such as mycotoxins must be added (although, of course, the report does not address this). In fact, all MRLs are calculated on a single compound, whereas it is well known that toxicity limits are lowered in the presence of two or more toxic compounds, even if not linearly. From this point of view, the survey highlights some recurring agrochemicals in certain products. It would be very useful to introduce limits that consider this now expected co-presence.
What can METROFOOD-IT do?
METROFOOD-IT systematizes state-of-the-art analytical capabilities across different food chains, creating an osmotic transfer between ultra-performing analytical methods ideal for setting standards but too expensive for business practice (e.g., HRMS, High-resolution mass spectrometry) and the development of portable, low-cost, user-friendly sensors that are highly transferable to industrial best practices for multi-analyte control. The "implementation" of these methods and sensors derived from them can help facilitate multi-residual analyses and create databases of product-toxic compound associations (with n>2), which will certainly and hopefully contribute to introducing regulatory limits that are more aligned with the daily reality of "what and how we eat."