The Food and Drug Administration has released its annual Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program report for fiscal year 2017.
Available for download at the FDA website, the report delivers results of the testing for 761 pesticides and industrial chemicals across 6,504 total samples, according to a news release.
For the pesticides that were tested for in FY 2017, th release said 96.2% of the 1,799 domestic and 89.6% of the 4,270 imported human food samples were in compliance with federal pesticide residue standards. No pesticide residues were found in 52.5% of domestic and 50% of imported human food
samples analyzed.
Domestic and import fruit and vegetable results
The FDA said that in the domestic fruits commodity group, 387 samples were analyzed; 14.2% contained no residues and 7 samples (1.8%) contained violative residues. For the domestic vegetables commodity group, no residues were found in 37.5% of the 563 samples analyzed and 53 (9.4%) contained violative residues.
For the import fruit commodity group, no residues were detected in 478 (39.8%) of 1,198 samples analyzed and 95 (7.9%) had violative residues. Of the 1,819 import vegetable commodity group samples analyzed, 763 (41.9%) had no residues detected and 227 (12.5%) had violative residues.
“The findings in this report demonstrate that generally levels of pesticide chemical residues measured by the FDA are below EPA’s tolerances, and therefore at levels that are not concerning for public health,” the agency said.
