The entire cashew chain is increasingly becoming the primary source of pesticide contamination, putting the health and safety of consumers at risk. To prevent the usage of harmful pesticides and possible contamination, there needs to be complete visibility of the origination and procurement stage resulting in a transparent, traceable and responsible cashew value chain.
The agricultural use of pesticides has enabled cashew farmers to increase their crop yields significantly in cashew producing regions. Pesticides provide a useful tool to control insects (insecticides), weeds (herbicides), plant diseases (fungicides), as well as other agricultural pests. One consequence of using pesticides in agriculture is that pesticide residues are often detected on our foods, including cashew nuts. The use of pesticides does not necessarily imply that residues will be encountered; many pesticide applications are made prior to the emergence of edible portions of nuts while in other cases, sufficient time between pesticide application and crop harvest allows the pesticides to degrade below detectable levels. Nevertheless, residues of pesticides on food crops commonly occur, and their existence is often the cause for consumer concern.
There are more than 1000 pesticides used around the world to ensure food products are not damaged or destroyed by pests. Each pesticide has different properties and toxicity levels depending on the Active Ingredient present on it. The toxicity of a pesticide depends on its function and other factors. For example, insecticides tend to be more toxic to humans than herbicides. The same chemical can have different effects at different doses depending on how much of the chemical a person is exposed to.
The presence or absence of pesticide residues is not a valid indicator of health risk to the consumer. Pesticides, like all chemicals, obey the first principle of toxicology: "The dose makes the poison" Thus, it is the amount of exposure and not the presence or absence of a chemical that determines the potential for harm.
The regulation on paper and the vicious reality
None of the pesticides that are authorised for use on food in international trade today is Genotoxic, meaning residue levels from these permitted pesticides at levels, not beyond the Maximum Residue Level (MRL) are not damaging to DNA, which can cause mutations or in some cases cancer. Adverse effects from these pesticides occur only above a certain safe level of exposure. When people come into contact with large quantities of pesticide, this may cause acute poisoning or long-term health effects, including cancer and adverse effects on reproduction.
The ban on many poisonous and highly harmful pesticides remain largely only on paper. Banned pesticides are often 'dumped' into African countries, where many of the cashew producing countries are, by the manufacturers. In turn, these cheap and comparatively 'aggressive' chemicals are highly sought after by farmers who are often unaware of the harmful effect it poses to them as well as the consumers.
Many pesticides banned in the European Union and the U.S. end up being sold cheaply in developing countries where safer alternative chemicals are not always available. Paraquat, for example, is a highly toxic weedkiller that was banned in the EU in 2007 and branded as "highly poisonous" by U.S. regulators. The chemical is still manufactured by the Swiss-Chinese firm Syngenta and exported to large swathes of the developing world.
A lot of cashew farming is done on small, often wild or naturalised plantations that don't use any fertilisers or pesticides as other nuts or food crops. However, the usage of pesticides cannot be completely ruled out as there is a small use of pesticides in the general industry, including the infamous DDT and other harmful chemicals.
Pesticide residues in cashew nuts
Cashew farms in Africa are located mostly in tropical areas with high pest pressure, which leads to heavy use and reliance on pesticides over traditional methods of pest control. Almost all of the cashew farmers are smallholder farmers who operate within a lax regulatory environment, and many do not possess adequate knowledge of optimal spray regimens or safety behaviour. Thus, most do not take adequate safety precautions.
One relief is that the natural form of cashews gives it two protective coverings in the form of the outer shell and inside testa layer. Most of the time, cashew nuts are significantly safer when compared with other conventional food products. A scientific study that was done in India pointed out that the shelling process has resulted in 93.58, 96.2 and 97.13% reduction of the initial deposit of residues and post roasting and peeling stage, the residues reached Below Detectable Level (BDL).
However, If the pesticide residue level breaches the Maximum Residue Level (MRL), then it can have harmful health effects on the consumer. Fetuses, infants, growing children, pregnant and nursing mothers, and women of childbearing age are most at risk for adverse health outcomes from exposure to pesticide residue in cashews. Children are more at risk than adults because children eat more relative to their body weight than adults eat. Exposures during vulnerable periods of development that includes fetal development, infancy, early childhood, and puberty can be particularly dangerous. Fetuses are exposed to pesticides through the mother's diet. Infants are exposed through breast milk.
The important question that remains here is, what if the cashew farmer has used unauthorised pesticides, which is often if not always way cheaper, easily available and 'aggressive', on his cashew farm?
The adverse effect of harmful pesticides used in the cashew chain is visible from the plight of the victims of Endosulfan poisoning in Kerala. Even though Endosulfan was banned in 80 countries around the world during the Stockholm Convention in 2011, the chemical is still used by farmers across the globe.
To identify if any banned or harmful pesticides or other chemicals have entered the cashew chain, there needs to be complete visibility over the origination and procurement stage of the cashew value chain. This visibility enables us to eliminate the usage of banned chemicals during origination by educating and training the farmers and applicators about the harmful effect these chemicals can have on themselves and the final consumer.
Our Farmer Management System (FMS), the prime enabler of our Sustainable and Responsible Procurement Program is a revolutionary step towards developing fully transparent and traceable sourcing networks, helps us to identify the fertilisers and pesticides used by our farmer suppliers. This significant inference derived from over 60 data points helps us stop any harmful pesticides from getting into the cashew chain by way of proper training and educating the farmer about the detrimental effects of the banned pesticides and suggesting safer and regulated alternatives and if possible organic solutions to their pest problem.
Isn't random sample testing by labs enough?
While labs are doing an excellent job by testing the random samples for harmful pesticides, it is not possible to test for every pesticide residue. The EU Commission has an MRL list for 494 pesticides for cashews. It would be costly and time consuming if not impossible to check for each of these 494 pesticides for every shipment of cashews. Besides, even though the sample will be drawn from about 5-10% of a particular lot, the actual testing for pesticide residue happens on only 0.006% of the entire shipment lot. The analytical results obtained are dependent on the sampling technique used and how the samples have been chosen. Errors may be produced by not understanding the population as a whole or sampling a subset of the population that is not truly representative of the whole.
This sampling method is, however, relatively safer if the entire lot is from a single farmer supplier and single origin. In case, when the raw cashew nuts from different origins and different farm-gate aggregators are mixed, the risks are much higher and in many cases, not entirely known to the buyers.
To ensure single-origin raw cashew are used in one lot of shipment, a robust end-to-end traceability system is needed to trace the flow cashew along the value chain spanning multiple stages. Our proprietary Cashew Traceability System (CTS) has been developed in-house using a hybrid of exemplary traceability frameworks and enables us to trace over 70 Key Data Elements across 10 Critical Tracking Events. This, when combined with our Procurement Management System (PMS), complete end-to-end traceability is achieved.
The bottom line - a fully Transparent, Traceable and Responsible cashew supply chain
The best way to prevent harmful pesticides from getting into the cashew chain is to identify and prevent usage during the origination stage itself. Educating the farmers and incentivising them for using safer alternatives is the next best step towards eliminating harmful pesticide usage.
Demand for origin and processing assurances are increasing worldwide from responsible customers who want to ensure that cashews have been procured and processed sustainably and responsibly. As customer and consumer drive up demand for a transparent, traceable and responsible supply chain, technological developments backed by our passion for opening up our supply chain to our customers is creating new opportunities in comprehensive supply chain transparency and traceability.
To mitigate risks arising out of harmful pesticides and their usage at the primary level, there needs to be complete visibility of the origination and procurement stage of the value chain. We achieve this visibility by harnessing the prowess of our Cashew Traceability System (CTS), Procurement Management System (PMS) and Farmer Management System (FMS) together.
The way forward - Shared Responsibility
All supply chain actors spanning across the cashew value chain should join together and pool in resources and expertise to eliminate the usage of harmful chemicals from getting into the food chain for protecting the health of the consumers. With consumer behaviour changing towards healthy diets and with many food lawsuits being filed around the world after finding pesticide residue in food, it makes good business sense too to step up in this fight to protect the food chain and the broader society as a whole.
Ebin Babu Oommen
Director, Alphonsa Cashew Industries
Related topics
More blog posts
