Lanka's tea ready to face stringent food safety laws

by Gamini Warushamana

Sri Lanka's tea is ready to meet new stringent food safety laws enforced by the World Health Organisation, Food and Agricultural Organisation of UN and individual countries. The Tea Research Institute of Sri Lanka (TRI) has prepared an extensive plan to maintain the standard of Sri Lankan tea and all stakeholders are now implementing them.

Last week all agro chemical companies operating in Sri Lanka agreed to stop the supply of chemicals banned by the TRI and to supply only chemicals recommended by the TRI. Accordingly, they have removed 16 pesticides from the market.

Senior Research Officer, entomology division of the TRI Dr. K. M. Mohotti said that this would solve the issue to a great extent.

Dr. Mohotti said that implementing TRI guidelines will not be difficult because large corporate growers strictly follow the TRI instructions in the tea industry and tea smallholders normally use few chemicals. Smallholders use only around four chemicals but now they have to keep records of pesticide usage, he said.

Senior research officer, biochemistry division Dr. A. M. T. Amarakoon said that under the new food safety laws the maximum residual limit (MRL) for pesticides is one important component introduced by many Sri Lankan export markets, specially EU and Japan.

These countries carry out random monitoring of MRL in all tea imports in several steps and if any violation is detected at any level it will automatically upgrade the monitoring to the next level. Level 1 is a normal random monitoring. At level 2, it increases monitoring where 50% of imports are checked.

At level 3 mandatory inspections come in to operation where 100% of imports are checked and the cost of inspection will be borne by the supplier.

At level 4, a total ban on imports will be enforced (for example if the item monitored is "Ceylon tea" there would be a ban on the import of Ceylon tea).

Already two violations have been recorded in Japan and as a result 100% of Chinese Oolong tea imports and 50% of Indian tea imports to Japan are now being inspected.

With regard to Ceylon tea, serious concerns have arisen about the detection of residual pesticides which are not recommended by the TRI and chemical addictives such as ferrous sulphate, which are added during the processing to make the teas darker. TRI has strongly advised to immediately correct these malpractices.

Under the new standards chemical compounds such as Nicotine and antibiotics should not be present in food items and very sophisticated instruments are used to monitor food imports to these countries. Therefore TRI advises tea growers to avoid the use of plant extracts such as tobacco and all kinds of microbial formulations. Neem extract is the only plant extract recommended by the TRI.

If the country fails to meet the new standards, the country will lose the tea market and under the new regulations the industry will be in a crisis if we fail to quickly change the practices, TRI cautions. Sri Lankan tea that is strongly competing with its high quality will face a challenge if the other competitors quickly adopt to these new standards while Sri Lanka does not adjust quickly, TRI officials said.