Swordfish and tuna from Spain polluted with heavy metals, dietary supplements and foods with ingredients not authorized by the United States and peanuts from China contaminated by carcinogenic aflatoxins, climb the podium of the "black list" of the most dangerous food products for health, which sees pistachios from Turkey in tenth place for the presence of aflatoxins beyond the legal limits. This is what emerges from the Coldiretti dossier on "The ranking of the most dangerous foods" presented by Coldiretti (www.coldiretti.it) at the International Agriculture and Food Forum in Cernobbio on the basis of the findings of the latest European Rapid Alert System (RASFF) report, which records the alarms for food risks verified due to chemical residues, mycotoxins, heavy metals, microbiological pollutants, dioxins or additives and dyes in the European Union in 2016.
There are 2.925 – underlines Coldiretti – the alarms triggered in the European Union with Turkey which is the country that has received the highest number of notifications for non-compliant products (276), followed by China (256) and India (194), the United States (176) and Spain (171). These are countries with a thriving commercial exchange with Italy which – denounces Coldiretti – also concerns the products most at risk; In 2016, 167 million kilos of fish were imported from Spain to Italy, an increase of 5% in the first half of 2017 while almost 2 million kilos of pistachios which arrived from Turkey in 2016 which has also exported to Italy almost 3 million dried figs and 25,6 million kilos of hazelnuts which are blacklisted for high risk.
By number of alarms triggered in 2016, in fourth place in the ranking are peppers from Turkey which - explains Coldiretti - recorded contamination beyond the permitted limits of pesticides, while the situation of dried fruit is worrying, such as pistachios from Iran and dried figs from Turkey, which are respectively in fifth and sixth place, both non-compliant due to the presence of aflatoxins, also considered carcinogenic by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA). Chicken meat from Poland follows in the rankings, which have been the subject of alarm for microbiological contamination beyond the limits of the law, in particular of salmonella. In eighth place we still find products contaminated by aflatoxins, hazelnuts from Turkey, followed by peanuts from the USA with the same food safety problem, which we still find in pistachios from Turkey and chili peppers from India. Other products followed - adds Coldiretti - were among the most reported, such as dried apricots from Turkey due to excessive sulphite content, nutmeg from Indonesia, for aflatoxins and chicken meat from the Netherlands, for microbiological contamination.
Italian agriculture - continues Coldiretti - is the greenest in Europe with 292 products with denomination of origin (Dop / Igp), the ban on the use of GMOs and the largest number of organic companies, but it is also at the top of world food safety with the lowest number of agri-food products with irregular chemical residues (0,5%), 3,2 times lower to the EU average (1,7%) and 12 times that of third countries (5,6%).
"There is no more time to waste and it is finally necessary to make the trade flows of raw materials from abroad public in order to make consumers aware of the names of companies that use foreign ingredients", he underlined the president of Coldiretti Roberto Moncalvo in underlining that "important steps forward have been obtained with the extension of the obligation to indicate the origin of the rice and wheat used in pasta, but much remains to be done because 1/3 of the expenditure remains anonymous, from fruit juices to tomato to cured meats”.
