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SPECIALTY BROKERS Integrated Pesticide Monitoring (IPM)

To protect human and animal health, the pesticide content of all food and feed in the European Union must not exceed certain maximum levels. Since many producers are still not able to limit or specifically name the pesticides they use, customers who process the raw materials must choose very carefully which producers reliably deliver high quality at origin.

Specialty Brokers, together with its partners, is doing pioneering work in the origin. Advice to the farmers, complete documentation and regular audits enable the purchase of excellent and high-quality raw materials.

We have created our own quality trademark for the labelling of raw materials that have passed our quality assurance measures from controlled cultivation to the export product: IPM = Integrated Pesticide Monitoring.

In recent years, we have seen drastic, and surprisingly rapid, bans and changes in residual MRLs for pesticides by the EU for more than 30 pesticides. Keywords here are iprodione and chlorpyrifos. This is in line with years of efforts by organisations such as Global GAP and UTZ or the Turkish Sultanas / Thompson sultanas - cultivation project IPM (Integrated Pesticide Monitoring). In all three cases, there is agreement (www.globalgap.org; www.utz.org) that conventional agriculture poses increasing problems for the environment and consumers. Smallholder structures in Turkey and the lack of control by the Turkish state led to a pesticide cocktail in sultanas that can consist of up to 100 different fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides.

Everywhere, the call for healthy and uncontaminated products is becoming louder and louder, and with it the demand for controlled, sustainable cultivation of agricultural products. There is also agreement that this can only be achieved through IPM and corresponding projects or certifications. Specialty Brokers has been addressing this issue for Turkish sultanas and Thompson sultanas since 2014 with its IPM project (Integrated Pesticide Monitoring) in cooperation with Özgür and leading pesticide producers.

Years of demands by leading organisations regarding the limitation of pesticides used, their traceability and the simultaneous reduction of MRLs are being implemented in the IPM project analogously to the requirements from the UTZ and Global GAP projects. The requirements in the Turkish Specialty Brokers IPM (Integrated Pesticide Monitoring) cultivation project are also based on the criteria of Global GAP and UTZ when it comes to training the IPM farmers and their responsible use of pesticides. Within the framework of our IPM cultivation project, we can guarantee complete traceability back to the individual IPM farmer and control the entire value chain from the vegetation phase to the dried product. We guarantee a maximum of 4 pro-actively used pesticides and, in the current campaign, we have observed a very low exhaustion of the EU maximum residue levels (MRLs) for pesticides by max. 50% of the limit value or less for the substances approved by us.