A 472kg shipment of strawberries from Japan that was recently stopped at the border due to excessive pesticide residue would have been legal under relaxed limits that took effect on Monday.
The shipment was seized on March 14 after traces of flonicamid, an insecticide, were found at a concentration of 0.02 parts per million (ppm), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a weekly report.
Before Monday, the maximum residue limit for flonicamid on strawberries was zero.
Photo courtesy of the Food and Drug Administration
From June 1 last year, strawberries from Japan have been subject to batch-by-batch border inspections after repeatedly failing FDA testing, mainly due to excessive pesticide residue. That ends on April 30.
FDA Deputy Director-General Lin Chin-fu (林金富) yesterday told a news briefing that from Sept. 25 last year through Monday last week, 31 of the 767 shipments of Japanese strawberries that arrived in Taiwan, or 4.04 percent, did not meet safety standards and were confiscated.
In light of these infringements, the FDA would continue batch-by-batch inspections of Japanese strawberries for an unspecified period after April 30, and would continue to impose one-month bans on Japanese firms that contravene regulations, Lin said.
In late January, the FDA announced a proposal to relax restrictions on flonicamid and three other pesticides — acequinocyl, chlorfenapyr and mefentrifluconazole — which are commonly used by strawberry growers in Japan.
Taiwan had previously set residue limits for use of the four pesticides on a range of other crops, but not for strawberries.
Under the FDA’s new rules, which took effect on Monday after public feedback was collected for a 60-day period, the maximum residue limits were set at 1ppm for acequinocyl, 0.5ppm for chlorfenapyr, 0.7ppm for flonicamid and 1.5ppm for mefentrifluconazole.
Other seized items in this week’s FDA food safety report included a 72 tonne shipment of Indonesian mung beans, 2,904 tonnes of yams from China and 3.363 tonnes of frozen northern snakehead fish from Vietnam.
All the seized items were either destroyed or sent back to their country of origin, the FDA said.
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