Organic rice contains heavy metals and pesticides? Organophosphate testing tells you what organic rice really is

Two types of organic rice in the country were found to contain the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which is very harmful to the human body. Which two types of organic rice are they? Let's take a look.

Hualien "Yinchuan Rice" and Taitung "Dadi Rice" are the two major brands of organic rice in the country. A December sampling inspection by the Council of Agriculture last year found residues of the pesticide "chlorpyrifos." Huang Youcai, Director-General of the Agriculture and Food Agency of the Council of Agriculture, said it may have been caused by rice blast disease in the late cultivation stage of the first rice crop in the 95th year, with pesticide sprayed on neighboring fields. The chlorpyrifos residue was 0.02 ppm, far below the 0.1 ppm pesticide residue limit for edible rice, so it is still very safe. The Council of Agriculture will require farmers to find ways to increase the distance between organic farmland and nearby conventional farmland to avoid contamination again.

Wang Changying, a section chief of the Agriculture and Food Agency of the Council of Agriculture, said organic rice is already the most strictly inspected agricultural product: "A bag of rice is sampled at least three times during production: once during field production, once after harvest and before entering factory storage, and once again when processed into finished products." Because the "Agricultural Production and Certification Management Measures" have not yet completed legislation, the Council of Agriculture can currently only cite the "Food Sanitation Management Act" to penalize each farmer 30,000 yuan for "false labeling" and require the products to be taken off the shelves. After all, rice with pesticide residues cannot be called organic rice. The Council of Agriculture pointed out that only after the agricultural product certification measures are passed can penalties be raised to between 60,000 and 300,000 yuan.

⟦NL> However, taking this time's tested Hualien "Yinchuan Rice" as an example, the leader of the production and marketing group is a second-generation farmer with a master's degree. He used his father's name as the brand to promote organic rice. Since 10% of production is exported and it is also the largest brand in the country, a 30,000 yuan penalty is a small matter, but reputational damage is at least over 10 million yuan.
Some pesticide experts also offered personal views to the Organic Agriculture Information Center, believing that chlorpyrifos is an insecticide and unrelated to the prevention and treatment of rice blast disease. Chlorpyrifos is an important ingredient in sanitation or disinfection products (such as cockroach killer or mosquito killer liquids), so contamination in warehouses is also possible.

But Liang Zhengxian, owner of Jianxing Rice Mill in Chishang, Taitung, protested that the Agriculture and Food Agency should use complete packaging as samples, rather than sampling one bag but opening and repackaging it into 500-gram test specimens for inspection. The repackaging process may be contaminated by warehouse disinfection.