By Alexia Saoulli
CONCENTRATED fruit juices are not local products of Cyprus and nor are a number of honey brands, despite manufacturers’ claims to the contrary, Consumers’ Association general-manager Dinos Ioannou warned yesterday.
“The only fruit juice – as far as I know – that is made 100 per cent in Cyprus, is grapefruit juice. And this is because the countries from which we import concentrated forms of juice do not produce this fruit,” he said.
In other words, orange, peach, apple, grape and banana juices were all predominantly made in Argentina or Brazil and only processed and package here.
“There is no law that states manufacturers must clearly label their products and define what percentage of their product is local and what percentage is not,” he said. “The way the law is phrased allows them to say it is pure honey or pure Cypriot orange juice, when it is not.”
Ioannou said the Consumers’ Association had long objected to this practice, but that the Health and Commerce Ministries had not done anything to regulate the existing law.
“We are not opposed to importing products from abroad. What we do object to is not informing Cypriot consumers what it is they are actually purchasing.”
Honey, for instance, was often imported from Bulgaria and China in a concentrated form and then processed here and called a product of Cyprus.
“But it is not a product of Cyprus when 90 per cent of it is from China and only 10 per cent of the mixture is made up of local honey.” The reason for this practice was because the imported product was much cheaper for manufactures to buy than its local equivalent, he said.
And the same went for concentrated juice powder from Argentina and Brazil. “Just by adding a small percentage of locally made orange juice to the imported product does not make it a product of Cyprus, and consumers should know this,” Ioannou told the Cyprus Mail. “It should be clearly stated on the label, because people cannot tell the difference from the taste.”
Although the association had not received any complaints from consumers, the problem lies in the fact that local health services cannot control how honey and fruit juice concentrates are produced abroad, he said.
“We don’t know how their trees are grown, what fertilisers are used, if the powder is genetically modified, what sort of chemicals are injected into the products.” In Cyprus, on the other hand, these aspects of agriculture could be investigated.
In fact, traces of a banned antibiotic, chloramphenicol, were found in brands of imported royal jelly over three months ago, said head of the State lab, Dina Akkelidou. And information was received from the European Union and North America last week that Chinese honey contained traces of the same drug and should be banned.
Chloramphenicol is used in the treatment of infections caused by bacteria and works by killing bacteria or preventing their growth. But the problem lies in the fact that this particular drug may cause the very serious condition of aplastic anaemia, she said.
Patients with aplastic anaemia have a complete failure of production of all types of blood cells. As a result the bone marrow contains large numbers of fat cells instead of the blood producing cells, which would ordinarily be present, according to the UK Leukaemia Research Fund.
Chloramphenicol has even been banned in animals, although some farmers still used it to prevent specific forms of bacteria from developing in their livestock or to fatten them up, said Akkelidou.
But, although all countries carried out both routine and spot checks on certain products, it was virtually impossible to investigate every single product in its market, she said. This was why the EU had established a Rapid Alert System. “When one country finds traces of a potentially harmful substance in one of their products, all other member states are informed and can carry out their own surveys,” said Akkelidou. It was thanks to this alert system that the government had been informed of the potentially lethal royal jelly and Chinese honey, said Akkelidou.
“When chloramphenicol was located in the royal jelly, it was removed from the market.” The same would be done if traces of the same antibiotic were found in honey imported from China.
Although tests carried out on ‘local’ honey this week have come up clear, Akkelidou agreed with the Consumers Association that the public had a right to know where the product it was consuming came from.
And as of next year the state laboratory would be in possession of specialised equipment that will be able to test exactly what nectar and from which flora bees used to make their honey, she said.
