Bees for Development Journal
73
HONEY TRADE ISSUES
HONEY TRADE ISSUES The following article by Michael Durham was published in the UK newspaper The Guardian in July this year. We reproduce it here, with kind permission from The Guardian, to inform readers of the difficult issues surrounding world trade in honey.
bitter taste of honey: stinging accusations of foul play in the
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beekeeping world have exposed the ruthless side of a global trade Michael Durham
The cosy-sounding world of honey has been going through turbulent times. When Northumbrian honey farmer Willie Robson blew the whistle on a fellow beekeeper, Richard Brodie, for potting Argentine honey and passing it off as Scottish borders honey, the court case that resulted last week before Berwick-onTweed magistrates exposed some of the tough realities of an intensely competitive international business. The most significant of these realities is that bees - like any creature - can get sick so beekeepers in some countries
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administer small doses of antibiotics. The less scrupulous overstep the limits by dosing hives with excessive levels or banned drugs. Britain produces only about one-tenth of the honey it consumes. The rest, about 22,000 tonnes of the sticky amber imported from countries all over the world, is often blended before sale. But how can we be sure that the honey in the pot is what the label says?
boardroom of Britain's biggest honey packer, Rowse - based in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, at the heart of Britain's ‘honey valley’ operations director Brian Butcher says that for legitimate blenders, "the trouble is there are so many places in the world where people are selling dodgy honey. Once you spot a problem area, it moves elsewhere". In the
In January this year, 14,000 jars labelled ‘Produce of India’ were stopped for testing at Felixstowe docks. The honey turned out to be contaminated with chloramphenicol, a wide-spectrum antibiotic banned in food production in most countries. In susceptible individuals, it can cause a fatal blood condition, aplastic anaemia. And the country most associated with the use of chloramphenicol on bees? China whose honey had consequently been banned on health grounds by the EU in 2002. Commenting on the Felixstowe seizure, Vijay Sardana, head of the indian trade body CITA, said that India believed Chinese honey was being smuggled into India through Nepal, repackaged and then sold abroad.
China rejects such accusations, saying that competitor nations have a vested interest in peddling untruths to get China's honey pushed off the market. And Beijing has received new support from Brussels, which has just rescinded the import ban after EU inspectors confirmed that China was moving to stop chloramphenicol use and establish an effective control and detection system for food safety. During the two-year EU ban, the disappearance of legal Chinese honey caused upheaval. For years it had been a basic ingredient in blended honeys because of its sweetness and cheapness now packers worldwide switched to Argentine, Mexican and east-European honey. Yet chloramphenicol-tainted honey kept turning up. Singapore suddenly
6
discovered a penchant for beekeeping surprising in a country which, according to Bee Culture magazine, "has no bees" in the commercial sense. Overnight in early 2002, just as Chinese honey was banned by the EU, Singapore became the world's fourth biggest honey exporter and the tonnage of honey sold to Australia, which in 2001 had been zero, leaped to nearly 1,500 tonnes.
As emails and faxes kept arriving at honey packers in Europe and the US offering cheap honey from some unlikely places, investigators came to a startling conclusion: contaminated honey from China was being relabelled and offer for sale as the produce of third-world countries. In the past ~
12 months, honey labelled as the produce of Cyprus, Tanzania, Moldova, Romania, Argentina, Portugal, Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria and Vietnam has turned up in European ports, honey blenders and supermarkets, testing positive for chloramphenicol. In this period, it has been found in 14 consignments intercepted in Europe and the EU's ‘rapid alert' food safety system in Brussels has been notified.
China challenges all attempts to brand its exporters as honey launderers, or its industry as the sole source of contaminated honey. “It is just not fair to immediately classify as Chinese honey anything containing chloramphenicol", says.
it ,
A detailed official statement to The Guardian throws the chloramphenicol allegations back at other honey producers: "Antibiotic in honey is a global problem, not just a problem to China’, it says, adding that the industry organisation Apimondia convened world conferences* in Germany in 2002 and 2004 to discuss this problem, after a survey of the international honey industry reported that "sulfonamides were found in Canadian honey, tetracycline and streptomycin in American, Mexican and Argentine honey, miticides and insecticides in American honey and chloramphenicol in Chinese and European honey". Regardless of the origins of the honey on sale in the shops, the question now for Britain's consumers will be: how safe is it?
During the ban on Chinese honey, the UK government's veterinary residues committee said it found just five samples
