The cosy-sounding world of honey — redolent of crumpets and jars with flowery labels in country shops — has been going through turbulent times.
When British honey farmer Willie Robson blew the whistle on a fellow beekeeper, Richard Brodie, for potting Argentine honey and passing it off as Scottish borders honey, the resulting court case exposed some of the tough realities of an intensely competitive international business.
The most significant is that bees can get sick; so beekeepers administer small doses of antibiotics. The less scrupulous dose hives with excessive levels or banned drugs.
One reason Brodie’s scam rang food-safety bells is that Argentine honey has come under scrutiny in recent times. For while Brodie represented small-time honey laundering, Argentina is among a number of nations suspected by the European Union of having laundered on a larger scale honey that is not their own.
Britain produces only about 10% of the honey it consumes. The rest, about 22 000 tonnes imported from countries all over the world, is often blended before sale. How can one be sure the honey in the pot is what the label says?
In January 14 000 jars labelled ”Produce of India” were stopped for testing at Felixstowe in south-east England. The honey was contaminated with chloramphenicol, a wide-spectrum antibiotic banned in food production in most countries. In susceptible individuals it can cause a fatal blood condition, aplastic anaemia.
And the country most associated with using chloramphenicol on bees? China — whose honey was banned on health grounds by the EU in 2002.
Commenting on the Felixstowe seizure, Vijay Sardana, head of the Indian trade body Cita, said India believed Chinese honey was being smuggled into India through Nepal, repackaged and then sold abroad.
China denies this, saying competitor nations have a vested interest in peddling untruths to force China’s honey off the market. And Beijing has received new support from Brussels, which has just rescinded the import ban after EU inspectors confirmed China was moving to stop chloramphenicol use and establish effective food safety controls.
During the two-year EU ban, the disappearance of legal Chinese honey caused upheaval. For years it had been a basic ingredient in blended honeys because of its sweetness and cheapness; now packers worldwide switched to Argentina, Mexico and East Europe. Yet chloramphenicol-tainted honey kept turning up.
In the export market there was a dramatic increase in honey from Vietnam, where the bees had gone into such overdrive that a country not known as a significant exporter had thousands of tons for sale.
Singapore suddenly discovered a penchant for beekeeping — surprising in a country which, according to Bee Culture magazine, ”has no commercial bees”. Overnight in 2002, just as Chinese honey was banned by the EU, Singapore became the world’s fourth-biggest honey exporter and the tonnage of honey sold to Australia, zero in 2001, leaped to nearly 1 500 tonnes.
Investigators came to a startling conclusion: contaminated honey from China was being relabelled and offered for sale as Third World produce. In the past year, honey labelled as the produce of Cyprus, Tanzania, Moldova, Romania, Argentina, Portugal, Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria and Vietnam has turned up in European ports, honey blenders and supermarkets, testing positive for chloramphenicol. It has been found in 14 consignments intercepted in Europe and the EU’s ”rapid alert” food safety system in Brussels has been notified.
China challenges all attempts to brand its exporters as honey launderers. ”It is just not fair to immediately classify as Chinese honey anything containing chloramphenicol,” it says. ”Antibiotic in honey is a global problem, not just a problem to China.”
It says the industry organisation Apimondia convened a world conference in Germany two years ago to discuss this problem, after a survey of the international honey industry reported that ”sulfonamides were found in Canadian honey, tetracycline and streptomycin in American, Mexican and Argentine honey, miticides and insecticides in American honey and chloramphenicol in Chinese and European honey”.
During the ban on Chinese honey, the British government’s veterinary residues committee said it found just five samples of chloramphenicol-contaminated honey in British shops. It appears that officials follow a system to test only where there are grounds for suspicion. But with contaminated honey detected in exports from countries as diverse as Spain, Portugal and Argentina, can any country be deemed safe?
Meanwhile, another phenomenon has been adding to the turbulence in the global honey market — ultra-filtered or ”UF” honey. First noticed in the United States, it is honey with almost everything taken out, including the impurities.
Bruce Boynton, chief executive of the US National Honey Board, said: ”I am not aware of chloramphenicol-contaminated honey entering the US any more. Now it looks like they have found a way to remove the contamination. At least some of the stuff coming in from China appears to be something other than honey.” In a test by the board earlier this year, nine out of 69 samples taken from American supermarket shelves proved to be UF honey.
This product is, according to most experts, not honey at all. It is ”a sweetener derived from honey” — honey that has been diluted with litres of water, heated to a high temperature, passed through an ultra-fine ceramic or carbon filter, and then evaporated down to a syrup again. In the process, every trace of impurity — including, some believe, traces of chloramphenical— are removed.
The US believes UF is now the real threat to the purity of honey internationally. ”It’s got a yellowish cast, and it is a little thicker than real honey, and it doesn’t taste like regular honey either,” Boynton said.
Hundreds of kilometres away in Texas, beekeeper Jerry Stroope complains: ”Nobody can prove it yet, but my guess is that all the big food manufacturers are using this stuff. And the US government is not going to take them on — they’re too powerful.”
So the sting in the tail is: Who needs to launder honey across international borders if you can ultrafilter it instead? — Â