A picture is worth a thousand words. EFSA understood this and has developed an informative tool to visualise the 2017 Pesticide Report, which includes data collected about pesticide use of different food groups in Europe.
More than 84000 samples had been analysed in total, and in more than half of the samples, no quantifiable amounts of pesticide residues were found. What was interesting though was that some of the major vegetable-producing countries had only comparatively few samples analysed. Spain, for example, tested only 2767 samples (or 6 samples per 100000 inhabitants). In comparison, Germany tested a total of 19254 samples (or 23 samples per 100000 inhabitants), followed by Italy with 11305 samples analysed (which equals 18.6 samples per 100000 inhabitants). Calculated per capita, Bulgaria took the lead with 95 samples per 100000 tested.
The largest number of tests was performed for Sweet peppers/bell peppers with more than 6000 samples tested, of which 50.8% samples were found to have higher than average rate of pesticides residue and 5.9% with higher than average residue levels above the MRL.
The data visualisation tool can be found on EFSA’s website.
