Banned pesticide in German grain

Germany is embroiled in a major pesticide scandal. The herbicide, nitrofen, banned in the EU since 1988, has been found in stocks of wheat used to supply farms all over Germany.

Nitrofen was first detected in January of this year by ‘HIPP’, a Bavarian baby food manufacturer known for its rigorous testing of all their ingredients. They detected an unusual compound in a consignment of chicken meat and identified it as nitrofen. The consignment of 83 tonnes of chicken meat was rejected and the supplier, Gruene Wiese, a large organic farming operation, was left with the task of tracking the source of contamination. Tests of various sources including water, feedstuffs, and inoculations traced the contamination back to the wheat used to feed the chickens. The wheat was supplied by GS agri, a major distributor of both conventional and organic grain. By mid-March GS agri knew they had sold wheat carrying a nitrofen load of 5.96 mg/kg, 600 times higher than the EU Maximum Residue Limit of 0.01 mg/kg. Concentrations in chicken fed with the wheat ranged from 0.07 to 0.8 mg/kg(1). 
    On 21 May the Federal Ministry for Consumer Affairs and Agriculture (BMVEL) informed the German state ministries who started testing for nitrofen. Within a few days the story became public. Reports of contaminated grain and chicken meat came flooding in. The Lower Saxony Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Farming impounded 230 tonnes of chicken meat, and four different states reported finding nitrofen in over 500 tonnes of fodder. Seventy-three farms which had purchased fodder were closed down(2).
    On 1 June the source of nitrofen was finally tracked to a warehouse in Malchin in the state of Mecklenburg, West Pomerania in the former East Germany. The warehouse had been used as a storage facility for a number of pesticides including nitrofen. The pesticides remained in this warehouse until they were removed in 1995, and the warehouse supposedly decontaminated. However, a sweep test of dust in the warehouse carried out in June of this year found nitrofen levels at a staggering 2000 mg/kg. The warehouse had been privatised in the early nineties and had been rented to different tenants over the years. Organic wheat sold by GS agri had been stored in this warehouse since October 2001.
    The investigation continued through June and the number of organic farms and businesses affected by the scandal increased. The scandal then spread to Europe where at least nine businesses in Belgium, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands suspected having purchased contaminated poultry. 

Health implications
So what exactly are the health concerns over this controversial pesticide? Chemically nitrofen is a phenol derivative that was used as a non-selective foliar herbicide. Although its acute mammalian toxicity is low, nitrofen is of serious concern due to studies showing it causes mutations, cancer and severe birth defects(3). In studies on mice and rats, nitrofen administered in the diet caused increases in liver, spleen and pancreatic cancer. In studies on rats, mice and hamsters nitrofen caused birth defects with rats being the most sensitive; doses as low as 0.3 mg/kg body weight per day were sufficient to induce deformities in offspring.
    Nitrofen was banned first in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It was withdrawn from the US market in 1980 and its US registration voluntarily withdrawn in 1983. This was followed by an EU-wide ban in 1988. The ban was extended to East Germany in 1990 after German unification. Nitrofen is now widely banned in many countries including India, the Philippines and China.

Repairing the damage
This scandal has raised many questions and touched many nerves. In the wake of the BSE scare last year Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and his agriculture minister Renate Kuenast, placed farm reform at centre stage. While 3.2 % of agricultural land in Germany was farmed organically at the end of 2000 they aim to increase this to 10% by 2005, with an additional 10% converting to organic by 2010. However, the discovery of nitrofen contamination in organic wheat and chicken has dealt a blow to the safe image of organic food. 
    This situation is unlikely to be unique. Obsolete stocks of banned pesticides still exist in many countries in Eastern Europe. An abandoned pesticide factory in Albania recently received new coverage in the UK(4). Although this factory was shut down in 1990 thousands of people have since moved to live on the contaminated land surrounding it. The extent of this problem in Eastern Europe is only starting to be uncovered and is of pressing concern. 
    While obsolete stocks of pesticides are likely to be rotting away in many corners of Eastern Europe the events in Malchin in the Former East Germany are still remarkable. (RM)

References
1.Informationen zu Nitrofen: Fakten und Massnahman, http://www.verbraucherministerium.de/verbraucher/informationen-zu-nitrofen.htm
2. Ibid.
3. WHO/FAO Factsheets on Pesticides no. 84 Nitrofen. November 1996.
4. Shanty Town in Albania Built on a Toxic Timebomb. The Independent, 7/6/02.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 57, September 2002, page 22]