Much of the fruit and vegetables in UK supermarkets contains potentially harmful pesticide residues, campaigners warn.

The supermarket chain Somerfield chain came out worst in the Friends on the Earth study, which showed 60% of its fruit and vegetables contained the residues.

But Somerfield said all its products were within UK safety guidelines.

Pesticides commonly found in supermarket foods include substances suspected of interfering with the hormone and nervous systems.

Friends of the Earth is calling for the use of the most dangerous pesticides to be phased out, and an eventual move to pesticide-free food.

What are the health risks of eating food treated with pesticides? What are the alternatives to pesticides?

Sandra Bell of Friends of The Earth answered your questions in a LIVE forum for the BBC's Six O'clock news, presented by Manisha Tank.

Transcript

Manisha Tank:
A new government report claims that the use of pesticides in Britain has actually fallen but that hasn't stopped campaigners from Friends of the Earth claiming that we're still using too many of the chemicals on our fruit and vegetables. In fact, they're also saying that much of the fresh produce in UK supermarkets still contain potentially harmful pesticide residues.

You've been sending in your questions and your comments on the subject and I'm going to put them to Sandra Bell who is a real food campaigner for Friends of the Earth. Sandra, thanks for being with us. We've had a huge response to the subject.

Steve Wexler, London asks: If a man eats an apple every day for 70 years how much pesticide is in his system?

Lara, London: Is it true that most pesticides are not water-soluble so it makes no difference if you wash fruit and vegetables before you eat them?

Sandra Bell:
You can't really give a figure for how much pesticide you'd have in your body from eating a particular product. But certainly when apples have been tested, they quite regularly contain pesticide residues and sometimes more than one residue.

In the latest figures that were published today, there did seem to be a decline in the residues in apples which is of course good news. But unfortunately still about one-third of the apples sampled contained residues and what we're wanted to see is completely residue free produce.

In terms of washing, unfortunately washing doesn't really make an awful lot of difference to pesticide residues. But peeling does reduce some of the residues - it doesn't eliminate all of them because some pesticides are taken up by the whole fruit or vegetable.

Manisha Tank:
So I'd have to say to K L Woon, who wrote in from Hull asking how he could reliably wash away the pesticides in vegetables and fruits, that washing, like you say, probably won't make that much of a difference.

Stephen G, Newcastle asks: Shouldn't all food products be labelled with washing/cleaning advice and details of any pesticide residue that may be contaminating them at the time of purchase?

This has been a big theme throughout our questions - what about the labelling and why don't we know about this?

Sandra Bell:
Certainly we'd like to see retailers be a lot more honest about the pesticides that they're finding in their produce and the use of pesticides on the food they're selling. So certainly the idea of some kind of label, we would welcome. I think it would be very hard to label all the pesticides that have been used on any particular crop. But certainly you could have advice labels in the supermarkets which at least declared that pesticides had been used in the production of particular fruits and vegetables.

We'd also like to see retailers publishing their own testing results more freely and making that information available to customers. At the moment only the Co-op and Marks and Spencer are prepared to do that - they put their results on their websites. The other supermarkets, such as Sainsbury and Tesco, have just said to us that they're not prepared to put that information out to their customers.

Manisha Tank:
Text message from Jackie Watts: Do the chemicals become more dangerous when they're heated with cooking?

Sandra Bell:
Again they're aren't really any simple answers to these questions. Certainly chemicals undergo changes when they're processed and heated, so in most cases, residues are reduced under any processing and cooking. In some cases, chemicals may change their nature as a result of being heated but generally the residues do go down with processing and cooking.

Manisha Tank:
Jonathan, London asks: What pesticides do organic farmers use and are they any better or worse than conventional ones?

Sandra Bell:
Generally the principle of organic farming is to try to avoid the use of any pesticides at all and so, for example, farmers use more crop rotation to avoid the kind of build up of any disease in any particular field. They also try to do more diverse cropping so that they're not leaving the crop so susceptible to attack by pests and diseases. Having said that, there are some crops which are hard to grow without any kind of pesticide - for example, organic potato farmers do tend to use pesticides, organic apple growers too. But there are only a very limited number of pesticides approved - I think there's about six that are allowed in organic farming whereas for non-organic farming there's about 400 different pesticides approved.

Our view is that organic farming needs to improve alongside non-organic farming. We'd like to see the pesticides that organic farmers use replaced as well but that's going to require research and development into finding alternatives to them.

Manisha Tank:
Sean Munro, Cambridge asks: If Friends of the Earth are concerned about the use of pesticides, why does it campaign against GM crops, some of which are engineered to contain natural pesticides? These crops are widely used in the United States, and increasingly in China, and have been found to greatly reduce the amount of chemical pesticides that used in agriculture.

Sandra Bell:
Actually, that is not the case - there is conflicting evidence from the US about whether or not pesticide use is reduced. In fact we've seen recent evidence that farmers are finding that the pesticides that the bio-tech companies sell to them to go with the GM crops are just not effective - they're not working - and therefore the farmers are actually resorting to older very toxic chemicals like a herbicide called Atrazine, which causes great concern because of the amount of water pollution it causes. Farmers using GM crops are reverting to using a lot of Atrazine because the pesticides that they've been to told to use with GM crops are just not working.

Manisha Tank:
P J Adams, Preston asks: What are the symptoms of too much pesticide in a person's system?

Obviously you've said to us that it's difficult to pin down but there has been suggestions that they can affect hormone levels, for example. Other viewers have written in as to whether pesticides and the use of them and getting them into your body ends up with sperm counts being lower for men, for example. What is the evidence actually showing us?

Sandra Bell:
There is a lot of uncertainty and debate still going on about the exact effects of these pesticides. But I think there's growing consensus from scientists that the time of exposure is very critical and therefore we have to be particularly cautious about pesticides being in foods that is given to babies, pregnant women or young children. The Government has introduced new laws which prohibit any pesticides being found in processed baby foods. So what we're saying is that should be applied to fresh fruit and vegetable as well because it should be a healthier choice to give infants fresh fruit and vegetables rather than processed food.

The sorts of effects which scientists are concerned about - certainly yes, those pesticides which are known to work on the hormone system either by mimicking our natural hormones or blocking the way they work - there is concern that those might be linked with increases in certain types of cancer - like breast cancer. In laboratories studies it has been shown that some of the fungicides that turn up on our fruit and vegetables do reduce sperm counts and affect the sperm quality - so they could be implicated in fertility issues.

Manisha Tank:
Terry Redditch, Worcestershire asks: How can we, the public, make a significant difference to the pesticide problem? Is there anything the public, as a nation, can do?

Sandra Bell:
Certainly yes. The best place to start is with the supermarket you shop at regularly. We've certainly found that consumer pressure has made a difference just by people raising their concern. The Co-op and Marks and Spencer have both introduced new pesticide policies whereby they've both got lists now of pesticides which they've prohibited they're suppliers from using and they've also set out a commitment to get pesticides out of their foods and to aim for residue-free food.

We are looking for the same kind of commitment from the other retailers but the best influence that people can have is to basically be shoppers and the supermarkets will respond to their own customers. So do write to them, phone them and say that you don't want pesticides in your food.

Manisha Tank:
On that activist note, Sandra - we've had the results of a vote while we've been on air - you've been voting on whether pesticides should be banned and used at all. Only 36% of you actually saying that you would support a ban on pesticides totally - of course those results aren't scientific, it's just the result of our on-line poll but they suggest that people generally across the nation are in favour of outlawing pesticides.

Sandra, what do you make of those figures from our straw poll?

Sandra Bell:
I think it's clear that people don't want pesticides in their food but also that it's not just a simple issue of banning all pesticides overnight. Clearly that would be very difficult for our farmers and farmers in other countries. So what we need is a process of phasing out these chemicals and replacing them with safer alternatives and replacing them with different methods of farming. For that we do need a commitment of resources from the Government and from the retailers to carry out research and development into different ways of farming but also into safer products that don't leave residues in our food.

Manisha Tank:
Steve Harrington, Ellesmere, UK asks: Much of the produce we buy does come from abroad. How can we be sure that farmers in third or second world countries are applying pesticides and fungicides correctly?

Sandra Bell:
We think that this certainly is a very important issue. We think that retailers or food companies that are importing food from developing countries have a responsibility, not only to their customers in the UK, but also to the farmers in those developing countries.

One of the problems that happens is that if the company decides to prevent the use of a particular pesticide to make food safer for customers here, the knock-on effect in the exporting country could be that those banned products tend to find their way onto the black market. This happens a lot in developing countries that then it ends up with small farmers - the poorest farmers - buying these banned products on the black market. These products are often not labelled at all, they don't have any instructions and they have even been cases of people thinking that they're medicine and using them as medicine with very dire consequences for their health. The responsibility is double - it is to consumers here but it's also to those farmers that are producing the food.

Manisha Tank:
Mario de Conti, London asks: Are UK and EU standards of pesticide residual on foods the same? If not, who has the highest standards in the world?

Sandra Bell:
Again, there's not really a simple answer to that. Certainly we're moving towards much more harmonisation at the EU level. Now there is some concern about that because we certainly don't want to see the lowest common denominator standards coming in - we want to see ever stricter limits. So there is a concern that to free up trade basically that lower legal limits will be accepted on pesticides and that's certainly something that we would campaign against.

In terms of forward thinking countries, we certainly find that Sweden has been very forward thinking in its pesticide legislation. It has a system whereby only the safest product for a particular purpose is allowed onto the market. So if a pesticide company comes forward with a product, if there's something already on the market which is less toxic then they will automatically not get approval for that product and we'd like to see that here as well.