India’s vegetable export trade into Europe and the Middle East has come under increasing scrutiny for pesticide residues over recent months.
On 1 April last year, the EU ordered compulsory testing of 10 per cent of imports of key Indian vegetable lines such as okra and curry leaves. The move followed random tests that revealed Indian shipments of these items were consistently breaching the EU's maximum residue levels.
With the EU screening process covering only 10 per cent of shipments, however, many Indian exporters chose to take a gamble and continued to send product without ensuring compliance with the requisite residue levels, according to one leading shipper. That approach has obviously jeopardised the entire trade, as well as India’s reputation as a supplier.
India's Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Agency (Apeda) has now stepped in and is working to implement a system to monitor pesticide residues in vegetable exports, according to director Sanjay Dave.
Apeda already has a robust software traceability and monitoring system for table grape exports called Grapenet, which it set up in 2003 in response to similar issues facing table grape shipments into Europe. Dave played a critical role in designing and implementing that system, and he is now overseeing the development of similar programme for vegetable exports, called Hortinet.
That process is rendered somewhat more challenging, however, by the fact that India’s table grape production is consolidated in certain areas, whereas the vegetable supply base is far more fragmented.
Apeda has decided to focus on six vegetables – namely okra, green chillies, aubergines, bitter gourds, curry leaves and drumsticks – which together make up 80 per cent of India’s vegetable exports worth an estimated US$163-183m (€121-€136m) a year, according to Dave.
“We asked the exporters where they were procuring these products from and they said ‘from the market’. They’ve all got agents they work with,” he explained. “They don’t source products like okra from one area as production moves around and sources keep shifting. So we decided to do a mapping of production and we worked out that production comes from 35-40 clusters across six states, namely Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.”
Apeda then conducted a pesticide profiling to determine the type of pesticides used on the vegetables and it has accordingly developed a package of practices for each of the six products along the lines of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). The package includes a list of recommended chemicals for use and another list for testing purposes, he explains.
Apeda worked with the six state governments to identify where the vegetables are grown and to help register the farmers. “From now on, exporters who are shipping any of the six vegetable lines will have to be registered on our Hortinet system and they will have to procure their product from the registered farmers,” explained Dave.
The registered farmers will now be trained in growing export-quality vegetables, including sorting and packing with barcodes for traceability to comply with EU standards, he adds.
Dave expects the system to be implemented in paper-based form in the next two months, paving the way for the software version. 'We expect to launch the electronic system in six months' time, which includes time required to train the stakeholders,' he said.
Once Hortinet is launched, Apeda plans to merge it with Grapenet as part of its goal to establish an integrated traceability software system for all Indian fresh produce exports.
Dave added that the Indian government has spent €4.9 on beefing up its National Referral Laboratory since 2003 – and it has now allocated a further €6-7m to further expand the centre’s capabilities over the next five years. The NRL, which is the central facility for managing residue analysis for Indian table grapes, is also handling this process for other Indian export products such as pomegranates and will also be responsible for vegetable testing in the future.
