Conflicting Safety Guidelines Slow Imports of Foreign Food and Wine : Government: U.S. trails Europe in establishing uniform standards for agricultural products.

When the Food and Drug Administration recently detained 11 shipments of French and Italian wines because they contained traces of a fungicide not approved in this country, the European wine industry nearly panicked.

After all, alcoholic beverages are the European Community’s largest agricultural export, and the United States is one of its most important customers.

The fungicide, procymidone, has been widely used in practically all of the world’s major wine-making regions since 1978, and is approved in 26 countries. Could the American government end up banning imports of many of the world’s greatest wines because of this regulatory inconsistency?

This may be the latest and largest example of imported products reaching American borders with chemicals we haven’t sanctioned here, but it is far from an isolated incident.

In fact, FDA is also currently detaining imports of some Chilean pears after finding residues of a pesticide that is not approved for that fruit, but is permitted on other produce items sold in the United States, according to John Wessel, director of the agency’s contaminants policy staff.

“It seems like every other week we’re telling foreign governments we can’t import (goods) because a chemical isn’t approved here,” said Curtis Kolker, a consumer safety officer at FDA.

Fungicides in European wine, pesticides in Chilean pears, hormones in American beef. There are numerous examples of how contradictory food safety standards not only present obstacles to trade but also raise questions about the inconsistency of laws when it comes to health.

There are, however, efforts afoot to harmonize these differences. The European Community plans to become a unified market in 1992, complete with one set of safety standards. U.S. government officials, hoping to increase American exports, have proposed a change in international trade deliberations that would remove what they believe are artificial trade barriers disguised as food safety issues.

Nevertheless, standardizing pesticide regulations is a far more complicated task than simply killing bugs or wiping out mildew. It is an issue that blurs the lines between protectionism, societal values and science, and one that tears interested parties, even those within the same country, in opposite directions.

At the same time, much to the chagrin of some domestic producers, many foreigners are muddling through the Byzantine regulatory system here to capture increasingly larger shares of the U.S. food market. The Department of Commerce reports that between 1980 and 1986, the real value of vegetable imports doubled while fruit imports tripled.

Meanwhile, chemicals are crisscrossing international borders like frequent flyers. From 1977 to 1987, the agricultural chemical market doubled in size to more than $17 billion, according to the General Accounting Office. The U.S. exports somewhere between 400 and 600 million pounds of domestically manufactured pesticides a year, accounting for approximately 10% of the international market, according to EPA.

About a quarter of these pesticides are products that are not registered for use in the United States, says GAO, and some of them come back to haunt us.

In the last two years, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., says, federal inspectors have found U.S.-banned and manufactured pesticides in beef from Honduras, pineapples from the Philippines and beans and carrots from Latin America.

Leahy introduced legislation recently that would prevent not only the importing but also the exporting of any pesticides unregistered in the United States. While the bill has support among farm, consumer and environmental groups, both EPA and the chemical industry oppose it.

One of the reasons for the opposition is that the chemical industry does not believe in the actual existence of a “circle of poison,” as Leahy refers to this world-wide situation.

“The importation of food that contains residues of products banned in the United States is infinitesimally small,” said Jay Vroom, president of the National Agricultural Chemical Assn.

In fact, according to FDA data, the largest percentage of import violations occurs because of residues of chemicals that are approved for use here, but not on the specific type of produce or commodity cited for violation.

Aside from the recent example of Chilean pears, in 1986, Mexico experienced more than 30 violations for permethrin residues detected on serrano, poblano, caribe and other peppers. EPA has a maximum tolerance level for permethrin residues on bell peppers, but it does not extend to other specialty peppers.

The next largest chunk of import violations occurs in circumstances similar to the case of the European wines: pesticides that are simply not registered for use here. Some of these may involve cases where the EPA has decided not to grant a tolerance for a health or safety reason; others may be because no company or foreign government has asked for one.

Interestingly enough, 92% of the violations in this category in 1986 involved procymidone, used on fresh grapes from Chile, Italy, New Zealand and South Africa.

Environmentalists believe that even though these pesticides may not have been banned, there may be reasons why EPA has not sanctioned their use. “Just because it’s not registered doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous,” said Lawrie Mott, senior staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In addition, says Leahy, FDA samples only a minuscule amount of the food entering this country and its testing methods do not pick up half of the registered chemicals.

On top of all this, the laws of various countries for pesticide registration and use vary considerably in sophistication and degree of implementation, says GAO. Some countries simply may not have the luxury of making this issue a priority.

In Ecuador, according to Mercedes Bolanos de Moreno, the chief of the country’s plant protection program, there is only one person in charge of reviewing all studies submitted for registration of pesticides.

“People are looking at food safety from their own societal values,” said Raymond Gill, deputy director of compliance in the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “Europe has a whole range of societal values, with the Germans and French in one area and the Greeks and Spanish in another,” he said.

People are also looking at food safety from different scientific perspectives. “We talk about science here as if, given the same set of science (knowledge), every country in the world would come out in the same place,” said Stuart Pape, a partner at the law firm of Patton, Boggs & Blow who represents domestic and foreign producers interested in marketing their products.

Societal and scientific perceptions aside, each country registers pesticides based on its own climate, crops and pest problems. The fungicide procymidone, according to Sumitomo Co. of Japan, the firm that manufactures it, alleviates a type of mold that commonly attacks European grape vines but is not prevalent here. (Other fungicides are used on wine-growing grapes in this country.)

What’s more, for whatever reasons, there are differences even among European countries. The tolerances for procymidone -- or maximum allowable residue levels permitted on the finished product -- vary there between 1 and 8 parts per million.

If all these factors weren’t confusing enough-yet perhaps even because of them -- many producers and countries simply do not know what pesticides have been banned or approved for use elsewhere.

There is no giant manual, for example, listing what chemicals can be used where. To find that information may require the help of a lawyer, an importer, a visiting government official, a translator or someone with a lot of time and patience.

From a small- or medium-sized Latin American or Caribbean producer’s point of view, U.S. regulations are a “quagmire,” according to Mike Moran, a food marketing specialist who has worked for agricultural development organizations in Latin America since 1961.

Four U.S. agencies are responsible for regulating food, and there is no systematic way for producers to get the most valid, up-to-date information, he said.

In fact, government officials from Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, which together provided 14% of U.S. produce imports in 1988, do not even have the EPA’s basic regulations listing the maximum allowable levels of pesticide residues on specific foods, according to a GAO report issued recently.

In Ecuador, from which came 11% of the United States produce imports in 1988, the country’s plant protection program chief said she never received notices when EPA banned eight different pesticides.

For the past decade or more, GAO and Congress have chastised EPA repeatedly for its failure to adequately notify foreign nations regarding pesticide suspensions and cancelations. More recently, GAO noted that EPA’s booklet describing the agency’s actions on pesticides has not been updated since 1985.

Although the problems have not been resolved, the EPA has made attempts to address them, said the GAO. In February, the agency proposed a number of changes that would improve notification to foreign governments and expand its technical assistance to international producers, said Kathleen Barnes, manager of international pesticide activities in the EPA’s office of pesticide programs.

Barnes said that simply sending information to other countries about pesticides that have been banned in the United States, or preventing their export, may not be an effective solution since countries may be getting those chemicals from other international sources. A more “holistic” approach, Barnes said, is to educate developing nations about pesticide regulatory systems and proper chemical use.

For people such as Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter, who is interested in enhancing exports of American products around the world, harmonization of food-safety standards is important.

That’s one reason why the U.S. Department of Agriculture is leading the charge in the latest rounds of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades to remove what it believes are artificial trade barriers directed in the name of safety tolerances. The ban last year of American beef treated with hormones was a prime example of this, USDA believes.

To achieve some degree of harmonization, the United States is proposing that all food safety disputes be referred to a special committee called the Codex Alimentarius, an international scientific body that sets safety standards countries may elect to follow. (FDA and USDA have recommended that EPA use Codex standards for imported foods for which EPA does not have a tolerance; EPA is evaluating the idea. The agency is also looking into ways of improving the process by which Codex standards are set.)

While Codex would not be the sole arbiter of the safety dispute, its input would be taken into consideration by a technical panel set up by GATT. Right now there is no formal mechanism by which to settle these kinds of grievances.

Environmental and consumer groups oppose the idea, however. Rodney Leonard, director of the advocacy group, the Community Nutrition Institute, believes it takes health and safety calls away from elected officials and puts them into the hands of bureaucrats.

But for those who want to protect domestic markets from foreign commodities, all this talk of harmonization may not be such good news. Cumbersome and restrictive regulations may be preferable. As Pape put it: “If I’m in the citrus business in the United States and I know I can grow much more citrus than I can sell here, I want to have a consistent set of principles so that I can ship my excess capacity around the world. If I’m a Florida tomato grower and I see lots of tomatoes coming in from Mexico, I have a different perspective on life.”

The answer is not yet clear what will happen to the European wines, since the FDA is still in the process of determining how widespread the problem is, and since the EPA is gearing up to evaluate the safety of the chemical. The Japanese firm that makes procymidone is planning to petition the agency for approval, yet getting it through EPA could take a minimum of nine months.

EPA spokesman Al Heier said he wonders why the company didn’t apply for a tolerance a long time ago, since Sumitomo sells other chemicals here and should be familiar with domestic pesticide regulations.

A Sumitomo spokesman, John Walker, said a tolerance was never pursued because residues had never been detected. Although the detection of the fungicide in the European wines came from a routine sampling at FDA’s Nashville lab, both EPA and FDA said that wines are rarely among the foods tested for potentially illegal chemical residues.

So far, 11 out of 116 wines sampled by FDA (mostly Asti Spumantes and Beaujolais) have come up positive and the agency is awaiting results from 84 more tests. The levels detected thus far are far below the legal limits allowed in Europe, but since the chemical is unauthorized in the United States, any level is illegal here.

In the meantime, those vintners with violative residues have been asked to certify that future shipments are free of the fungicide.