Food Adulteration in India is Endangering Health and Boosting Business

Have you been having honey every day for the last seven months as you were told of its magical properties to build your immunity?  Honey has been the elixir of health in India for generations. It has been a part of the country’s traditional knowledge for centuries. Think of how your grandmother coaxed you to have a spoon of honey to battle infections related to cold and cough and also deal with inflammation.

Chances are that you are among the millions who went and shopped for honey with basic essentials and not only had it but insisted that everyone in the family has it.

Wait.

Have you consumed honey manufactured by Dabur, Patanjali, Hitkari, Zandu, Apis-Himalaya, Hi-Honey, Dadav, Indigenous and Society Naturelle, or other top brands? If you did, there is reason to worry as investigations by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)  found that they were adulterated. Their findings were validated by tests on the same samples done by a laboratory in Germany. It found that only three out of 13 top brands passed the internationally accepted Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) test. The ones which passed the test were Saffola, Markfed Sohna and Nature’s Nectar.  CSE said that most of the honey sold in the Indian market was adulterated with sugar syrup.

DANGEROUS ADULTERATION OF FOOD

Adulteration is a thriving business in India. Foodstuff is one of the major targets as it is easy to adulterate and getaway. Turmeric powders are mixed with chemical colours to make them look brighter. Salt with chalk powder. Peppercorns with dried papaya seeds. Coriander powder with sawdust. Tea leaves with same coloured leaves. Coffee seeds with tamarind seeds. Different vegetables are coloured with dyes to look bright and some of them are carcinogenic. Brick powder is mixed with chili powder.

The Annual Public Laboratory Testing Report for 2014-15 by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI)  indicates that of the 49,290 samples of food items it tested, 8,469, nearly one-fifth, were found adulterated or misbranded.

It is not just food, but anything that sells. Petrol. Diesel. Drinking water. The list is endless.

The Annual Public Laboratory Testing Report for 2014-15 by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI)  indicates that of the 49,290 samples of food items it tested, 8,469, nearly one-fifth, were found adulterated or misbranded.

CSE found that honey sold by numerous major brands contained a modified sugar syrup was specially imported from Chinese manufacturers who designed it to bypass purity tests in India as it would not detect the sugar content.

Out of the 22 branded honey samples picked up from the market, 17 were adulterated.

CSE got samples tested in laboratories in India and Germany to find that 77 percent of samples were adulterated with sugar syrup.

CSE researchers wondered why honey was not being sourced from honey keepers in India as much as it should as the demand for honey was high. Honey keepers told journalists from CSE that something fishy was going on, as honey prices had unrealistically come down, says Arnab Pratim Dutta, associate editor of Down to Earth.

Sunita Narain, Director General of CSE said that this was a nefarious and sophisticated food fraud on consumers who trusted these companies and thought they were strengthening their immunity due to its intrinsic anti-microbial properties.  Instead, people were consuming more sugar adding to their risk during Covid-19, she said.

CSE researchers wondered why honey was not being sourced from honey keepers in India as much as it should as the demand for honey was high. Honey keepers told journalists from CSE that something fishy was going on, as honey prices had unrealistically come down, says Arnab Pratim Dutta, associate editor of Down to Earth. Honey prices which were around Rs. 160 a kg in 2015 had collapsed to around Rs. 60 a kg in 2018. Honey was cheaper as it was adulterated with sugar syrup.

It found that high amounts of fructose syrup were being imported from China with Chinese online trading platforms like Alibaba claiming that it could pass all the tests done in India. The syrups were available for prices ranging from Rs. 53 a kg to Rs. 70 a kg.

In the last four years, as much as 11,000 metric tonnes of fructose syrup had been imported into India and nearly 70 percent of this had come from China.

CSE procured pure honey and deliberately adulterated it with the syrup and found that it cleared all the FSSAI tests!  It also sent the samples to a lab in Germany and their results were validated.

Undercover CSE investigators contacted Chinese companies posing as a honey company based in India saying that they were looking for a syrup that could slip past Indian tests. The Chinese companies told them that their syrup could adulterate up to 80 percent of honey and stay undetected in the tests.

CSE ordered the syrup. It came camouflaged as a “plastic pigment emulsion” through Hong Kong to avoid any suspicion by customs.

CSE procured pure honey and deliberately adulterated it with the syrup and found that it cleared all the FSSAI tests!  It also sent the samples to a lab in Germany and their results were validated. “What we found was shocking,” says Amit Khurana, programme director of CSE’s Food Safety and Toxins team. “It shows how the business of adulteration had evolved to pass stipulated tests in India. Our concern is not about the adulterated honey, but how it is difficult to catch,” he said.

Honey manufacturers do not have to now import it from China as the Chinese technology to develop the syrup was now being replicated in a factory set up in Jaspur, Uttarakhand and other places in India!

CSE selected 13 top and smaller brands of processed and raw honey being sold and tested it at the Centre for Analysis and Learning in Livestock and Food) at the National Dairy Development Board in Gujarat. Almost all the top brands with the exception of Apis Himalaya passed the tests of purity, while a few smaller brands failed the tests to detect C4 sugar However, when the same samples were subjected to Nuclear Magnetic Resonance tests abroad, almost all big and small brands were found adulterated.

It is not that the government is not aware of the fact that honey is being adulterated.

DID THE GOVERNMENT KNOW?

In August this year, it made Nuclear Magnetic Resonance tests mandatory for honey that is for export. Got the idea?  Was the government aware of this adulteration business and therefore made this mandatory?  In fact, on 18th June 2020,  FSSAI flagged the need to enhance surveillance, sampling and enforcement to check the use of golden syrup, invert sugar syrup and rice syrup in honey.

The honey market in India is projected to reach Rs. 2,806 crore by 2024. In the last 12 years, India’s honey production has grown by 200%, and exports by 207%. India exported 61,333 million tonnes of Natural Honey to the world worth Rs 732.1 crore during 2018-19. The major importers of Indian honey were the USA, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Qatar. If India does not clean up its adulteration act, it will lose credibility in the international market.

Narain wants the government, industry and consumers to stop the import of syrups and honey from China, strengthen enforcement in India through public testing so that companies are held responsible and lastly, the government should get samples tested using advanced technologies. It should make this information public so that health is not compromised. Each and every honey company should be mandatorily required to trace back the origins of the honey from the beekeeper to the hive, she said.

Sonal Dhingra, Deputy Programme Manager, Food Safety and Toxins, CSE, told The Leaflet: “India has fairly robust standards compared to the global scenario. In 2018 gazette standards FSSAI had included all important adulteration tests. But in 2019, the food regulator removed some parameters like the Specific Marker for Rice (SMR), Trace Marker for Rice (TMR) and Foreign Oligosaccharides which were crucial for detecting adulteration. Later, in  June 2020, SMR and Foreign Oligosaccharides were reinstated, but TMR was not which is an important parameter for testing. One test is not enough as all have to be done to complement each other to detect adulteration.”

OUTRIGHT DENIAL

As expected, the industry was in complete denial after the CSE study was out in the public domain.

Dabur insisted that its honey was 100 percent pure and had no sugar or other adulterants.

Patanjali called it a plot to defame the Indian natural honey industry to promote processed honey and promote German technology and machines and lower the market share of Indian honey in the international market.

Emami and Baidyanath also said that their honey was pure and adheres to all quality norms in India.

“Honey shall be the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of blossoms or from secretions of plants, which honey bees collect, transform and store in honeycombs for ripening.” It also provides that honey “sold as such shall not have added to it any food ingredient, including food additives, nor shall any other addition be made other than honey.” 

CSE stood by its findings. It said: “The NMR test report on Dabur’s website and shared with media in support of the company’s statement is a report of the Bruker equipment/machine for NMR profiling. Bruker is a company that developed NMR and promotes it. We would like to make the consumer aware that this is not a laboratory report, which involves expert interpretation of the information by the equipment. In the case of NMR, it is critical that final conclusion on a sample’s adulteration is based on interpretation and confirmation by a laboratory expert on NMR.”

CSE said that Dabur’s claim about compliance with Indian laws was not a surprise. The Indian labs testing for parameters set by the FSSAI could not detect this evolved adulteration. The fact that samples deliberately adulterated by us by up to 50 percent of syrups passed all Indian tests is robust proof of this. So, any claim of meeting all Indian standards actually holds limited value, it said.

The FSSAI has made strong laws against adulteration, but as implementation is lax, adulteration becomes an industry in itself.

Adulteration of food or drink intended for sale is penalised under Section 272 of the Indian Penal Code (1860). It provides that the offender shall be liable for imprisonment extending to six months, or with fine extending to one thousand rupees, or with both.

LAW MUST BE IMPLEMENTED

India does have food and safety standards and also ones that deal with honey:

Some of the standards were operationalised in 2020.

The special law governing food safety in India is the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006. It established the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India and repealed the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954, among other laws.

The 2006 law was enacted with the objective of ensuring that processed, imported, manufactured or distributed food complies with domestic food safety laws. It defines adulterant as “any material which is or could be employed for making the food unsafe or sub-standard or misbranded or containing extraneous matter” [Section 3(1)(a)].

Regulations have been enacted under the law for securing the objective of safe food standards.

One such regulation is the Food Safety and Standards (Food Products Standards and Food Additives) Regulations, 2011. Sub-Regulation 2.8.3 of it, inter alia, provides that“Honey shall be the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of blossoms or from secretions of plants, which honey bees collect, transform and store in honeycombs for ripening.” It also provides that honey “sold as such shall not have added to it any food ingredient, including food additives, nor shall any other addition be made other than honey.”

It lists 18 parameters that honey shall comply with. This regulation was introduced as recently as in the year 2018.

FSSAI recently also published the Food Safety and Standards (Food Products Standards and Food Additives) Ninth Amendment Regulations, 2020 governing processing aids.

Other relevant regulations include Sub-Regulation 2.3.2(3) of Food Safety and Standards (Contaminants, Toxins and Residues) Regulations, 2011 that regulates the level of antibiotics in honey, and Sub-Regulation 6(1)(a) of Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018 that governs claims regarding non-addition of sugars to a food.

Chapter IX (Sections 48 to 67) of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 contains provisions penalising various specific offences for failing to comply with provisions of the law and regulations made thereunder. In fact, Sections 66 specifically governs offences by companies.

There are enough laws, but will the government move against huge corporations that deal with food and processed food items and are found to be adulterating it?

(Ramesh Menon is an author, documentary filmmaker and Editor of The Leaflet. Views are personal.)