Significantly, 11 of the 12 honey brands tested would have failed the export standards India sets with its Export Inspection Council, but such standards are not applied to domestic consumption. Two imported brands of honey, from Australia and Switzerland, were so heavily contaminated with antibiotics that they would have failed their own domestic standards.
Following the banning of Indian honey imports to the EU for antibiotic content, the Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based research and advocacy institute, tested twelve commonly available brands of honey for antibiotics. They found concentrations of multiple types of the substance in eleven out of twelve brands. Those testing positively included Darbur, which holds 75 per cent of the market share in the branded segment.
Standards for antibiotic content in honey are vague: most commonly, there are none. In Europe and the US, a lack of standards is taken to mean that the presence of antibiotics is illegal and unauthorised. In India a lack of standards is taken to mean that no regulation is necessary.
Antibiotic content in food is primarily of concern as frequent exposure can cause pathogen mutation and, later, resistance. A 2003 joint workshop by the FAO, the World Organisation for Animal Health and the WHO (a fairly watertight trio) on the non-human use of antibiotics concluded that,
“…there is clear evidence of adverse human health consequences due to resistant organisms resulting from non-human usage of antimicrobials. These consequences include infections that would not have otherwise occurred, increased frequency of treatment failures (in some cases death), and increased severity of infections.”
Resistant bacteria can be passed from animals to humans through animal or animal product consumption, following bacterial mutation from exposure to antimicrobials. In addition to treating illnesses in animals, antimicrobials are also used for mass treatment against infectious diseases, or in continuous and low doses in food for growth promotion. Concern is such that Denmark voluntarily banned the use of all growth-promoters in animals in 1995, and all other European countries followed suit in 1997.
The study, published in Down to Earth magazine in September, also investigates the honey business in India, a fascinating and fairly niche uncovering. It seems attempts at forming cooperatives by the beekeepers of India have been quashed by big exporters and packers, seven of who dominate the honey export business. The beekeepers refer to a ‘cartel’, forcing them to push for quantity over quality in their honey production. Beekeepers extract honey before it’s mature, reducing the quality, and extract most of the honey they can from bee boxes. Traditionally, some honey would be left to sustain the bees through the non-flowering season, but their foodstuff has now been replaced with sugar syrup, which can reappear as artificial sweetness in the eventual honey product.
Antibiotics are used without discrimination. Officially, only one antibiotic (oxytetracycline) is permitted in India, and that too in the case of severe attack of European foul brood disease, a malady of the honeybee that has been common in India. In practice, most types of antibiotics are available over the counter, and beekeepers also make common use of ‘Chinese strips’: pesticide-coated paper lengths illegally imported from China and sold at a far lower price than the scientifically-recommended mite deterrents.
As with so much of commercial industry, ready labour is valued over experience or skill, and the article interviews an 18-year old ‘hotel-employee-turned-beekeeper’ in Haryana, north India. Ajay Singh Yadav travels with 200 bee boxes every year, following the flowers with his tribes of insects as the seasons bloom across the country. He uses Chinese strips, though his boss denies it. Ajay is pleased with the outcome: he uses the strips “so that the queen bee lays more eggs,” because “the packet shows a picture of a hen with many eggs.” He considers it has “shown results.”
Another bee worker in Uttar Pradesh, a state to the east of Delhi, uses a pain-relieving balm to “help bees that have headaches.” He believes bees rub their heads on the bee box to ease head pain.
Most curiously, it seems honey has now become the stuff of illegal shipping routes, a trade gleefully referred to by the media as ‘honey laundering.’ Following the creation of an ‘anti-dumping tax’ by the US on honey imports from China – a reaction to the complaints of American beekeepers that the middle kingdom was flooding their market with substandard product – Chinese companies began re-routing their US-bound honey exports through other developing countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and India. Arrest warrants are still out following an investigation into one importer’s evasion of US $80 million in anti-dumping duties, a bizarre tale involving multiple corporations, countries, rerouting of calls through Hong Kong and instructions to employees to only speak in German when making phone calls. A sticky business indeed.
You can read the full report on antibiotics in Indian honey here.
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