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Pesky Pesticides

Dutch Incident Underscores Holes in EU Organics Legislation

By Nils Klawitter

A case of pesticide-contaminated vegetables is causing a stir within the booming organic food industry. The case illustrates that controls are too lenient. So too, apparently, are EU regulations.

The little fennel plants from Holland delivered to Bernd Kugelmann last June looked too good to be true. Kugelmann had finally transformed his farming business into an entirely organic operation.

On top of that, he had become a contract farmer for Bioland, Germany's largest organic farmers' association, and he had even managed to reel in Lidl, one of the country's biggest discount supermarket chains, as a major customer. But the seedlings he purchased just seemed too clean to his eyes to be truly organic.

Kugelmann had obtained them from the West Plant Group in the Dutch city of Venlo -- hundreds and thousands of them. And since he had also noticed obvious remnants of little turquoise-colored pellets, he asked an expert at Bioland to test the plants in the laboratory. The result was devastating: The small fennel plants had apparently been soaked with pesticides.

Kugelmann immediately turned himself in to Bioland and informed Lidl. The retailing giant immediately recalled Kugelmann’s plants and dumped him as a supplier.

During the weeks that followed, Kugelmann lost not only more customers, but also his faith in the good of people working in the organics industry. He had to destroy part of his crop and was no longer able to use the land that had been contaminated with the pesticides. By then, lettuce and celery had also become contaminated, and Kugelmann's lawyer was estimating total damages of around €650,000 ($1 million). Kugelmann was left with the impression that honesty doesn’t really pay, not even in the eco-community.

What about the organics boom which Germany is experiencing at the moment? "It passed me by," says Kugelmann, whose operation is based in the southwestern German town of Kandel near the French border. To this day, he claims he hasn't received a single cent in compensation for the damage caused by his Dutch suppliers. Adding insult to injury, a representative of West Plant Group recently maintained at Biofach, the World Organic Trade Fair in Nuremberg, that all the fennel plants Kugelmann purchased had left the company in pristine ecological condition. Kugelmann, aged 42, says he is now living "from hand to mouth" and is asking his suppliers for payment deferral until his next crop is harvested.

Kugelmann's may be an extreme case, but it neatly illustrates a fundamental problem within the organic industry, which has fast transformed into a multi-billion euro business: At the rapid rate it is growing, inspectors can hardly keep up with demand. When they manage to take a test sample at all, the inspectors resemble unsuccessful controllers trying to catch a professional cyclist doping red-handedly: Modern pesticides degrade within a few days, with hardly any traces left.

His case also underscores the problems with the European Union's policies on organic farming, which permit conventional crops to be grown alongside organic produce in a single greenhouse. In the Netherlands, where a single body, Skal, has authorization to certify organic products, the monitoring process is particularly poor, claims Greenpeace expert Martin Hofstetter. "The fact there will be no consequences for the perpetrator in a situation like this is a scandal," he says.

The evidence to back Kugelmann's claims also seems solid. With a representative of West Plant Group right beside them, inspectors from Bioland's board of control, Acbert, took samples of freshly delivered organic fennel right off the pallets just arrived from Holland. Chemical analysis showed “a significant level” of residues of pesticides. At up to 1.4 milligrams per kilogram, the amount of tolclofos-methyl, an aggressive fungicide, exceeded the maximum permissible quantity by 14,000 percent. The green seed pellets found by the inspectors also contained other prohibited substances. Tests conducted at a second organic farm in the southern part of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany revealed similar results.

After being informed by Acbert, the Dutch inspection service Skal then decided to take a closer look for themselves. They found a "high concentration" of tolclofos-methyl in fennel plants growing inside a West Plant greenhouse. Skal director Jaap de Vries insisted that up to that point they had never had "any problems" with their client, but last summer he had withdrawn a permit from one production site. "We found conventional and organic food growing side by side."

Kugelmann’s lawyer Hanspeter Schmidt is calling the Skal report “fairly vague” and points out that Skal refuses to share any detailed findings of their analysis. Schmidt filed fraud charges against West Plant, but the public prosecutor in the nearby Dutch city of Roermond failed to identify any criminal wrongdoing and dismissed the suit.

The agricultural inspection services in both countries which, according to EU guidelines, are supposed to cooperate in such cases, have too little contact with each other.

"We are talking about a common market a lot, but here we see how much of a show it really only is," says Bioland president Thomas Dosch.

For farmer Kugelmann, dark days lie ahead. The agricultural trade journal Gemüse would not take up his case -- company lawyers for West Plant had exerted considerable pressure, claiming that Kugelmann had offered "no evidence whatsoever" of chemical contamination. Bart Verhalle, chairman of West Plant recently cancelled an interview, did not even want to answer written questions and basically went into hiding using Skal’s certification as his protecting shield.

That, at least, does not seem to be endangered at all. As Skal’s director points out, no systematic shortcomings were found at his company.