Over 97% of foods in EU contain pesticide residues within legal limits

The 29 reporting countries carry out two monitoring programmes for the report: a national programme designed by each country, and an EU-coordinated programme under which all food control authorities monitor the same “basket” of food products. A combined total of 80,967 samples of a wide variety of processed and unprocessed food products were tested for the presence of 685 pesticides. The main findings are:

• 97.4% of the samples analysed fell within legal limits;
• 54.6% were free of detectable residues;
• 1.5% clearly exceeded the legal limits, taking into account the measurement uncertainty Scientific concept used in risk assessment to describe all types of limitations in available knowledge at the time an assessment is conducted, with the agreed resources, that affect the probability of possible outcomes to the assessment, thus triggering legal or administrative sanctions against the food business operators responsible;
• Residues of more than one pesticide (multiple residues) were found in 27.3% of samples.

   Interactive report (5.8 Mb. To view file, download and open in Adobe Reader)
EFSA has developed an interactive report that lets you drill down past the headline figures to find out more about the samples analysed and pesticide residues in food in 2013.  

The majority of samples (68.2%) were taken from food originating in Europe, with 27.7% coming from food imported from third countries. The percentage of samples from third countries exceeding legal limits was higher (5.7%) than for EU countries (1.4%). However, exceedance rates for imported food have fallen by nearly two percentage points (from 7.5%) since 2012.

For the EU co-ordinated programme, the reporting states tested 11,582 samples from 12 food products – apples, head cabbage, leek, lettuce, peaches, rye, oats, strawberries, tomatoes, cow’s milk, swine meat and wine. The results showed that 99.1% of the samples contained residue levels within permissible limits and almost 53% contained no measurable residues. 

Compared with the results for 2010, when the same food products – excluding wine – were tested, the percentage of samples exceeding the legal limits has fallen for all food products tested. 

EFSA used the data from the EU co-ordinated programme to assess whether current dietary exposure For the purposes of risk assessment, measurement of the amount of a substance consumed by a person or animal in their diet that is intentionally added or unintentionally present (e.g. a nutrient, additive or pesticide) to pesticide residues presented a risk to human health in the long term (chronic) or short term (acute). The Authority concluded that the presence of pesticide residues in food was unlikely to have a long-term effect on consumer health. For short-term exposure Concentration or amount of a particular substance that is taken in by an individual, population or ecosystem in a specific frequency over a certain amount of time, the risk of European citizens being exposed to harmful levels of residues via their diet was rated as low.

•   The 2013 European Union report on pesticide residues in food