At 10:22 PM -0400 00/7/27, Adony Melathopoulos wrote: >Has anybody ever checked the honey being imported to see if there is any >trace of illegal drugs in the honey? ... >Wallner, K. 1999. Varroacides and their residues in bee products. >Apidologie. 30: 235-248. > >The paper states that in the US there are official residues for honey for >fluvalinate and amitraz. ... >Somebody else on the list may be able to provide a perspective on where >harmonization sits today. That is an important question. My detailed direct experience was only the first dozen years of the NZ regulatory system for poisons, from 1979. That system has now been superseded by new statutes but the basic relationship between industry and bureaucracy has not improved. The main method is to set permissible levels far above prevalent & foreseen environmental levels, so that what is actually being imposed on people by industry could not be restricted by the permissible levels. Perhaps the earliest famous example was the old USAEC permissible exposure to ionizing radiation for the general public, 0.17rem/y, exposed by the admirable Prof John Gofman. The 'default very low' setting is a more recent twist, referred to by Adony. These settings sit there in abstraction until some party desires to impose higher doses. The application to do so (e.g. to raise 200-fold the permissible glyphosate levels in Australasian food, to legitimise RRĘ soybeans and cotton linters) can often go smoothly. It must be added here that monitoring is scanty, and when actual contamination exceeds permissible levels (e.g. in a NZ 'food basket' survey) no penalty will usually result. The general game is a charade to present an appearance of regulation while actual pollution is not significantly curbed. Sometimes a particular chemical, or a particular GMO, gets spotlighted (usually these days by some ignorant PowerHarpie or Angry Aborigine). I had the honour of spotlighting dioxin and 2,4,5-T from 1971 with Prof R B Elliott and a growing number including Greepneace. But there were 17 subsequent years of 2,4,5-T manufacture. Such a system regulates rather little. I suspect the USA system is becoming more complex, arcane, commercial, and illogical. Ours sure is. Meanwhile the rule-fixated WTO largely keeps out of the GEF controversy. ANZFA, created to harmonize food standards across Australia & New Zealand, is an even rubberier stamp than ERMA, dominated by industry claims. 'Harmonization' seems usually to mean imposing the weakest regime on other countries, as if no nation has any right to impose more serious restrictions than the most permissive allowed elsewhere. The effect of this 'lowest common denominator' approach will be that the standards set by the most corrupt govts will overwhelm those suggested by more scrupulous societies. This mode of global misconduct encourages dangerous pollution. What does not happen in all these varieties of charades is regulatory action to protect ecosystems from the dangerous processes of distributing poisons and of growing GM crops. Gambling is *in*. Dawkins is feted as if a serious scientist. The reputable scientist Pusztai is vilified. Prince Charles' brilliant science-based leadership is mocked on grounds such as the size of his ears and other irrelevant criteria. And in all this, critics of GM are depicted as unscientific. It is true that some of them are - and the media focus on them to the virtual exclusion of science-based critics. But the more important truth is that science-based conservationists on environmental toxins, and on GM, are far more scientifically scrupulous than the PR agents who are hired to make out that it's all OK. The further menace is scientists & medicos who play down hazards because they want freedom to play God. These defiances present democracy with some of its most serious challenges. R - Robt Mann consultant ecologist P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand (9) 524 2949