M ONITORING P ROGRAMS ;G ENERAL A SPECTS

11.2.2 M ONITORING P ROGRAMS ;G ENERAL A SPECTS

There is a growing interest in pesticide residues in food from all aspects of the food chain from ‘‘the farm to the fork.’’ It is the national governments that are responsible for regular monitoring of pesticide residues in food. Besides the national govern- ments, monitoring activities or surveillance are also performed by nongovernmental organizations or by scientists studying the occurrence and fate of pesticides in relation to environment, agriculture, food, or human health. Food companies may also monitor pesticide residues in their products to secure and demonstrate good food safety quality of their products and=or prevent economical losses.

The monitoring sampling may be surveillance sampling where there is no prior knowledge or evidence that a specific food shipment contain samples exceeding the

MRLs. The surveillance sampling may also include more frequent sampling of food groups with samples frequently exceeding the MRLs. Compliance sampling is defined as a direct follow-up enforcement sampling, where the samples are taken

290 Analysis of Pesticides in Food and Environmental Samples in case of suspicion for previously found violations. The follow-up enforcement may

be directed to a specific grower=producer or to a specific consignment. To cover both the control aspect and the food safety aspect regarding exposure assessments, the design of a monitoring program may be a mixture of a program where the different food types are weighted relative to the consumption or sale and one where the food groups with samples exceeding the MRLs are weighted higher. In order to be able to have more samples of the same type for comparisons, all sample types may not be monitored annually as the selection of some (minor) sample types may change from year to year.

The monitoring programs do often include imported as well as domestically produced foods. Domestic samples may be collected as close to the point of production as possible, for food crops the sampling may be at the farm or at wholesalers or retailers. Imported samples may be collected by the customs author- ities or at the import firms or retailers. The samples are often raw food, for example, fruits, vegetables, cereals, or food of animal origin. In addition, different kinds of processed foods are monitored, for example, dried, extracted, fermented, heated, milled, peeled, pressed, washed, or otherwise prepared products. The different kinds of processing, in most cases, lead to a decrease in levels of pesticides compared with the contents in the raw food.

An important parameter for a monitoring program is the choice and the number of pesticides investigated. To cover as many pesticides as possible, both multi- methods and single residue methods may have to be included in the monitoring program. In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) was able to monitor roughly half of the 400 pesticides for which U.S. Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA) had set tolerances. 14 The same year all states participating in the EU monitoring program together analyzed for 519 different pesticides. However, most of the individual countries analyzed for a much smaller number of pesticides, for example, about 100

15 –200. In addition to the selection and number of pesticides analyzed for, the detection limits of the pesticides in the different foods are deter-

mining for how frequent findings of pesticide residues are. On a worldwide scale, two major monitoring programs including many states exists: the EU monitoring programs and the US FDA program, both programs publishing their annual results at their respective Web sites. As an example, the

‘‘Monitoring of pesticide Residues in Products of Plant Origin in the European Union, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein 2004’’ included a total of 60,450 samples of which 92% of the samples were fresh fruits, vegetables, and cereals and 8% were

processed foods. 16 The US FDA program included 7234 samples of fruits, veget- ables, cereals, and food of animal origin. 14