Australians order up salad, with pesticide on the side

Consumer alarm about food treatment is growing, writes BILLY ADAMS.

SYDNEY - Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the kitchen, another sobering tale of the hidden dangers in the food we eat.

It is the turn of people in Sydney to stop in their tracks at mealtime.

They have been told that vegetables on sale in the city may have been grown by farmers who regularly misuse pesticides. And mounting evidence links pesticides to a range of serious ailments - from birth defects to cancer to infertility.

A report for the New South Wales Government warns that the pesticide misuse by market gardeners risked contaminating some of the $A150 million ($185 million) of veges sold locally each year.

Not to mention the fact that the gardeners - many of whom were migrants who could not read the English labels - were putting their own health at risk.

The report estimates that more than half became ill after using the chemicals.

The State Government - which has cut its testing programme on pesticides in vegetables and fruit by 40 per cent - is accused of failing to properly monitor and deal with the long-standing problem.

The revelations have caused a stir in Sydney, but consumer and food safety groups say they underline deeper issues that should concern everyone.

Alison White, of Wellington, coordinator of the New Zealand arm of the Pesticide Action Network, said there was no way of telling if the same problem applied in New Zealand because no such data was available.

She said that without stringent enforcement procedures, who actually applied the pesticides and what labels they could read was of little consequence.

"When you go into a supermarket and buy a piece of fruit or vegetable, the simple fact is that you don't know what you are getting," she said.

"It's a bit like playing Russian roulette. On the one hand it might have little or no levels of pesticide at all ... on the other, those levels may be dangerously high.

"Mostly you can't see the pesticides. You wash or peel some of them off, but some of them go right through. You have no way of knowing."

Consumer activists also say the Sydney findings highlight wider areas of concern for food safety in general on both sides of the Tasman.

Responsibility for the Sydney market gardeners lies with the NSW Agriculture Department, and is outside the remit of the overall food regulator, the Australia New Zealand Food Authority (Anzfa).

Rebecca Smith, the Australian Consumer Council's food policy officer, believes a far more coordinated approach is urgently required. She says the consumer is losing out from a system which puts agricultural experts solely in charge of what is ultimately a public health issue.

Her fears extend to new legislation which will give the food industry more power over the body that supervises food health and safety standards.

Business interests will gain up to half the seats on the Anzfa board, and state health ministers will no longer be able to amend the board's recommendations, only approve or reject them.

Smith says the changes fly in the face of other countries' moves to toughen public health safeguards over the preparation, marketing and sale of food, particularly in Europe, which continues to suffer the consequences of the foot-and-mouth and mad-cow disease outbreaks, and the controversy over the impact of genetically engineered crops.

She claims public health and safety is being compromised as Anzfa will become stacked with industry representatives primarily concerned with commercial considerations and profit.

"If these changes had happened last year, we would never have got the genetically modified food labelling we have now," she said.

Australia's food industry representatives dismiss those claims, arguing that Anzfa's commitment to public health and safety will be strengthened by the changes.

Anzfa itself has given Australia's food chain a clean bill of health. Its 19th Australian Total Diet Survey tested 69 commonly eaten foods and found them to be low in pesticides and heavy metal contaminants, and well within international health safety standards.

"This confirms the widely held view that Australian-produced foods are among the world's cleanest," said Senator Grant Tambling, the Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Aged Care.

But Maggie Alderson, Sydney Morning Herald columnist, has urged people to start asking questions, and thinking, about where their food comes from.

"You only need to buy organic milk and fruit once to marvel at the difference," she wrote recently. "It turns in a day.

"Which begs the question: what have they done to the other stuff to stop that happening?"