Food of Animal Origin: New Rules for Reporting Residues of Pesticides
COMMISSION REGULATION (EU) No 212/2013 of 11 March 2013 replacing Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards additions and modifications with respect to the products covered by that Annex
The link to the document is available here: Link to document (from EU website: 12.03.2013)
Poster with helpful clarifications: click here
Background:
At the workshop of the EURL/NRL Network for Pesticides in Food of Animal Origin and Commodities with High Fat Content in Freiburg (Germany) in October 2010 the interpretation of "Footnotes of EU Regulation 396/2005, Annex I" was discussed.
Annex I of Regulation 396/2005 is important for the correct application of the MRLs set in Annex II. Especially for food of animal origin, the footnotes 5, 6 and 7 are important with regard to the different handling of water soluble and fat soluble pesticides in meat/preparations of meat, milk/milk products and eggs/egg products. As these footnotes are not easy to understand and leave some room for interpretation, there were a lot of questions from the network to the EURL in the past regarding the correct interpretation. Therefore it was decided to address this topic in a special session at the 2010 workshop. The aim was to clarify unclear wording without changes of the meaning.
It was considered necessary to include COM (e.g. the legal services) and EFSA to make sure that the derived amendments are in accordance to the meaning of the text. After exchange of views by e-mail, the core working group "footnotes" held its meeting in November 2011 in Freiburg. 13 experts (NRLs: 7, EFSA: 1; EURL-AO: 5) participated in the workshop.
The main suggestion of the core working group "footnote" was to bring the matrices for food animal origin in line with other EU legislation (e.g. muscle instead of meat). This is now part in the new regulation and hopefully the interpretation of the content becomes easier.
However, the Commission does not foresee any transitional measures: the MRLs currently established in legislation will remain the same. Thus, the MRL values for muscle are higher than actually needed (resulting from the former calculation on a fat basis). But this is not a big problem for fat soluble compounds because nearly all residues of these pesticides will be located in the trimmed fat and not in the muscle. Anyhow, EFSA will continue reviewing MRLs on a regular basis, meaning that on the longer term all MRLs for residues of fat soluble pesticides in muscle will be adjusted in line with the new approach.
THe EURL AO has presented a poster with some comments at the EURL Joint Workshop in Almeria in October 2013. The poster is available at FIS-VL (CIRCA) and CIRCABC.
NEW! A presentation at EPRW 2016 is available at CIRCABC!
Last update: 03.06.2016
Published 15-03-2013, 14:47:58
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