The ABCs of MRLs and food trade

Food quality under control
Regulatory harmonisation in Asia begins with issues close to the heart of Asia – food. Asian countries face the challenge of feeding their growing populations with safe, affordable and nutritious food. In addition, many Asian countries are major players in global food trading, where value is linked with the quality of goods. Trade regulations could control food quality by setting specific limits on chemical residues, including pesticides, detected on specific crops placed in the market.

Legal limits link with good practices
National governments set pesticide residue limits based on the principle that farmers should use the least amount of pesticide that is effective for protecting crops against pests in a set of local conditions. These pesticide residue limits are called maximum residue limits or MRLs. When a food crop commodity passes the MRL test or when its pesticide residue falls within the legal limit, it means farmers who produced the crop have followed good agricultural practice (GAP). Since food commodities could be granted or denied entry to markets on the basis of their pesticide residue levels, MRLs are often called legal trading limits.

Now here’s the catch
Understandably, many countries in Asia and around the world have set different MRLs for the same set of pesticide-crop combination. To food exporters, this means access to one market does not open doors to all others. MRL harmonisation aims to change that, giving exporters more revenues from additional market access. Hence, harmonisation has the potential to lower prices for the same quality of goods and even create more consumer choices in the domestic market.

What's being done?
At the international level, the Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The Codex MRLs on Pesticides in Food is one such standard, but it currently lacks universal acceptance among national governments and regional authorities.

At the regional level, the ASEAN region is actively pursuing harmonisation of MRLs, with some progress on MRLs for pesticides in vegetables.

 

Read more about
Understanding MRLs
Alan J Brown, AgroLinks, March 2004

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Links to MRL databases, food regulation