January 12, 2012

The U.S. Government announced this week, that future imports of Brazilian orange juice will be prohibited if the product contains any trace of the fungicide carbendazim, which does not have an import tolerance.  Increasingly, maximum residue limits (tolerance) on fruits, vegetables and tree nuts, and their by products, is an increasing concern for many countries and consumers.  Generally speaking, MRL problems can be caused by growers not being aware of specific pesticides not having a tolerance in the importing country.  In the 1990’s, the French wine industry faced a similar problem, when certain wine grape’s had trace elements of pesticides that did not have an established U.S. import tolerance; it took one year before an import tolerance was established for pesticide. 

To view the Wall Street Journal’s Article on Brazilian orange juice, please click here. (Difficulty with source news links? If the complete article does not load after clicking on the FPP reference article link, please attempt to search the full title of the article on web via Google or Yahoo.)

For more information on pesticide tolerances see Chapter 8 of the FPP Manual, Pesticide Registration.