The cosy-sounding world of honey - redolent of toasted crumpets and jars
with flowery labels in country shops - has been going through turbulent
times. When Northumbrian 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 court case that resulted last week before
Berwick-on-Tweed magistrates exposed some of the tough realities of an
intensely competitive international business.
The most significant of these realities is that bees - like any creature -
can get sick; so beekeepers administer small doses of antibiotics. The less
scrupulous overstep the limits by dosing hives with excessive levels or
banned drugs.
One reason that 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 EU and other industry sources of having laundered on a larger
scale honey that is not their own in recent years.
Britain produces only about one-tenth of the honey it consumes. The rest,
about 22,000 tonnes of the sticky amber imported from countries all over the
world, is often blended before sale. But how can we be sure that the honey
in the pot is what the label says?
In the boardroom of Britain's biggest honey packer, Rowse - based in the
Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, at the heart of Britain's "honey valley" -
operations director Brian Butcher says that for legitimate blenders, "the
trouble is there are so many places in the world where people are selling
dodgy honey. Once you spot a problem area, it moves elsewhere."
In January this year, 14,000 jars labelled "Produce of India" were stopped
for testing at Felixstowe docks. The honey turned out to be 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 the use of
chloramphenicol on bees? China - whose honey had consequently been banned on
health grounds by the EU in 2002. Commenting on the Felixstowe seizure,
Vijay Sardana, head of the Indian trade body CITA, said that India believed
Chinese honey was being smuggled into India through Nepal, repackaged and
then sold abroad.
China rejects such accusations, saying that competitor nations have a vested
interest in peddling untruths to get China's honey pushed off the market.
And Beijing has received new support from Brussels, which has just rescinded
the import ban after EU inspectors confirmed that China was moving to stop
chloramphenicol use and establish an effective control and detection system
for food safety.
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 Argentine,
Mexican and east-European honey. Yet chloramphenicol-tainted honey kept
turning up.
In the export market there was a dramatic increase in honey on offer from
Vietnam, for instance, where the bees had gone into such an overdrive that a
country not known as a significant honey exporter had thousands of tons for
sale. And there was something else. Thomas Heck, a director of the leading
British honey importer Kimpton Brothers, recalls being offered a
container-load of Vietnamese honey two years ago. "Standard Vietnamese honey
is dark, but this was white," he said. "It wasn't from one of our usual
suppliers. We turned it down."
Singapore suddenly discovered a penchant for beekeeping - surprising in a
country which, according to Bee Culture magazine, "has no bees" in the
commercial sense. Overnight in early 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, which in 2001 had been zero, leaped
to nearly 1,500 tonnes.
As emails and faxes kept arriving at honey packers in Europe and the US
offering cheap honey from some unlikely places, investigators came to a
startling conclusion: contaminated honey from China was being relabelled and
offered for sale as the produce of third-world countries. In the past 12
months, 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. In this period, 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, or
its industry as the sole source of contaminated honey. "It is just not fair
to immediately classify as Chinese honey anything containing
chloramphenicol," it says.
A detailed official statement to the Guardian throws the chloramphenicol
allegations back at other honey producers: "Antibiotic in honey is a global
problem, not just a problem to China, "it says, adding that 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."
Regardless of the origins of the honey on sale in the shops, the question
now for Britain's consumers will be: how safe is it? During the ban on
Chinese honey, the UK government's veterinary residues committee said it
found just five samples of chloramphenicol-contaminated honey - labelled as
being from Argentina, Romania and Moldova - in British shops. Officials
cannot possibly check all 22,000 tonnes imported from abroad, and it appears
they follow a system to test only where there are good 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?
According to Butcher, who is also chairman of the Honey Association, a trade
body, the British importers and packers who actually put most of the honey
into the jars are on top of the problem. "Now we test everything and we
stick with suppliers we know and trust. When they found contaminated
Moldovan honey, every honey packer in the UK knew about it within the day.
We are confident nothing will get through."
The Honey Association's technical adviser is Peter Martin, an expert on
pollen analysis whose hobby is learning Mandarin Chinese and who keeps a
freezer full of honey samples from all over the world in his kitchen. Martin
has travelled three times to visit Chinese honey farms and is struggling to
master the language because, he says, he believes the future for safe honey
lies in persuading the Chinese to produce it, not just telling the Chinese
to keep their honey to themselves. Martin has never found chloramphenicol in
any samples sent to him for analysis by British packers.
Meanwhile, another phenomenon has been adding to the turbulence in the
global honey market - ultrafiltered or "UF" honey. First noticed in the US,
it is honey with almost everything taken out, including the impurities.
Bruce Boynton, chief executive of America's National Honey Board, told the
Guardian: "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 - as distinct from the "fine-filtered honey" marketed in
Britain by companies such as Gales - is, according to most honey experts,
not honey at all. Instead it is "a sweetener derived from honey" - honey
that has been diluted with gallons of water, heated up 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 chloramphenicol - are removed.
America's believes that UF, rather than contaminated honey, is now the real
threat to the purity of honey internationally. "It started coming in a year
or so ago," Boynton said. "It's got a yellowish cast, and it's a little
thicker than real honey, and it doesn't taste like regular honey either.
We're developing a good, reliable test for it with a research institute in
Oregon. The thing about this stuff is that it's incredibly cheap. A lot of
packers deny it, but I imagine it could be used quite widely in the American
food industry instead of the real thing."
Hundreds of miles away in Texas, beekeeper Jerry Stroope is just as
forthright. Stroope, who farms 6,000 bee colonies across 100 square miles of
Texas to produce indigenous wildflower and tallow tree varieties, 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 these boys on - they are just too powerful."
So the sting in the tail is that, if Stroope and the US National Honey Board
are right, who needs to launder honey across international borders if you
can simply ultrafilter it instead?
UF honey may not as yet have reached these shores. A spokeswoman for the
Food Standards Agency said: "We are not aware of 'ultrafiltered' honey
entering the UK, and the process described would go against the spirit of
the UK's honey regulations and would result in a product not of the nature,
substance or quality expected by consumers. We will be talking to the
relevant enforcement authorities to advise them of the possibility of
products of this nature entering the UK."
Butcher says British packers have never encountered the stuff. "If UF honey
does exist, I am certain we would be able to tell. I don't think it could be
imported into Europe. By all accounts it is tasteless and colourless. We
would know from the tests that something was wrong and we would not use it."The Guardian:
