In 2013, India started using Neonicotinoid pesticides in order to protect a crop that Monsanto had promised the Indian farmer he would not have to use pesticides on. These are the worst pesticides in the world and they have been indicted for having killed billions of bees. I called a meeting of ICAR in 2014 to ask for a ban of these pesticides. ICAR refused, even though they admitted that the bee population has gone down sharply. They said cotton was more important than fruit, grain and flowers which are dependent on bee pollination!
If bees have gone down in number drastically, how has honey production tripled? Till 2013 the yearly growth rate was only 0-4.8 per cent. From 2013-14 the growth rate rocketed from 5.3 to 11.1 per cent! This could not have happened naturally. How have hundreds of honey companies come into the market? This question has always troubled me. I don’t eat honey.
Last month the environment magazine, Down to Earth, answered this question in a detailed investigation that they took months over. You should read it. We do not take food adulteration seriously and yet it is the highest form of corruption, and should have death penalty on it.
I will attempt to encapsulate what they have discovered, but again, I repeat, go onto their website and read the expose.
Let’s start with the basics: Honey is eaten because it is known to be an antioxidant and has anti-microbial properties. It is expensive to create, because thousands of bees have to be maintained and fed a steady diet of flowers. Sugar has no nutrient value and is known to add weight and cause chronic disease. It is cheap. The FSSAI is the government organisation in charge of food standards. In 2017, the FSSAI ordered that honey should be tested for adulteration with corn, sugarcane, rice and beetroot syrups. The test was called C3 and C4. The tests were isotope tests, SMR, TMR, foreign oligosaccharides tests and pollen counts. In 2019, FSSAI mysteriously issued a directive revising, and downgrading, the parameters and allowing the adulteration to go undetected. The Director of the National Bee Board told Down to Earth that he had written to the government saying that by reducing pollen count FSSAI has legalised the practice of adulterating and selling rice syrup and corn syrup as honey. The cheating of the consumer, by honey processors, has been legalised.
By now companies selling honey have increased massively and become very powerful. But strangely enough, honey farmers were all going bankrupt because these companies had stopped buying their honey.
So, we have a huge honey industry which uses no honey? So what do the “honey” bottles contain? Sugar syrup import into India from China has increased steadily. Fructose and glucose syrup was being imported from China to India in bulk amounts. In 2014, 10,000 MT came in. By 2017 it was more than 4,300 MT. These syrups are imported under the names of “Fructose syrup (F55/F42)”, “Honey blend syrup”, “Tapioca fructose syrup”, “Golden fructose glucose syrup”, even “Fructose Rice Syrup for Honey”. Anyone from India can look up portals like Alibaba, Okchem and Tradewheel, and order from a host of Chinese companies.
The FSSAI issued directives to sugar importers saying they had evidence that this Chinese import was being used to adulterate honey. The FSSAI announced in 2020 that the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) was now mandatory for any company exporting honey.
Did the fructose syrup import stop? No. It simply changed its name. The Chinese were not hiding their product. On all large Chinese portals they were advertising a sugar syrup called the All Pass Syrup. The advertisements claim that the chemical mixture, called syrup, can pass the honey adulteration tests – C3, C4, TMR, SMT, Oligosaccharides and even NMR! Companies in India are importing this chemical mixture, which was being sent to India in some cases as “industrial raw material”, and even “paint mixture”, from China. The FSSAI chooses to look the other way.
Down to Earth ordered samples online from two Chinese suppliers called Wuhu Foods and CNN Foods. In their order they specifically stated they wanted this syrup to pass all government tests. Both companies wrote that their product could pass any Indian tests, even if adulteration was upto 80%, and added that their Indian clients used this percentage in their so-called honey bottles. The samples that Fedex brought in simply said “syrup” and “paint pigment emulsion.”
Down to Earth took pure raw honey and mixed it themselves with the Chinese and Indian adulterants (from a company in Jaspur) in different proportions – from 25% to 75% – and sent these to the Gujarat-based Centre for Analysis and Learning in Livestock and Food (CALF) of the National Dairy Development Board. The samples passed all tests upto 75% adulteration!
In August 2020, Down to Earth bought honey marketed by 13 companies and sent them to CALF. All large companies passed the tests except for one. Three of the smaller brands failed and even the C3 test showed they had more than 20-27% cane sugar. All these three are labelled as Raw Unprocessed
Natural Honey!
But Down to Earth did not stop there. They sent all brands for gold standard test – the NMR. There is only one testing point in India – the Export Inspection Council in Mumbai. They refused to do the tests. So, Down to Earth contacted a well known German Lab, which specialises only in honey adulteration tests including NMR, and sent the samples – from the same batch that had passed the tests in Gujarat.
They sent 17 samples from 13 companies. Only THREE passed the tests. All the others, including some major ones, FAILED.
This means ONLY THREE companies are selling us pure honey. The rest are all massively adulterated with chemical sugar syrup.
In any other country these people would be in jail and the company would be shut down. FSSAI has ignored this meticulous expose. Obviously FSSAI is implicated in the scandal – after all, they agreed to previous attempts at adulteration by deliberately lowering the standards for large honey companies. These companies have even failed the lowered standards of adulteration.
During the lockdown, people went all out to improve their health. Honey sales from March 2020 went up by 35%. But instead of making their bodies healthier, people were actually starting the day with shots of sugar syrup, which is just poison. Sugar increases inflammation in the body, suppresses immunity and makes the body vulnerable to disease, including diabetes, and corona.
If you are angry, this is what you should do: Send emails/tweets etc. to the Prime Minister at @ narendramodi asking for – 1) Banning of ALL sugar syrup imports from China, and closing down the factories importing it; 2) Every honey company MUST be able to trace the origins of the product–which beekeepers they buy it from. Each beekeeper should be licensed. This is mandatory for many food products in Europe. When eggs were discovered with pesticide in them, the labelling immediately showed 21 poultries in the Netherlands and they were shut down; 3) Testing requirements, that FSSAI lowered, should be brought back and NMR should be made compulsory; 4) FSSAI has no data at all on honey producers, syrup producers. The Beekeeping Development Committee, which is directly under the PM’s Economic Council, has no data on honey production, sale or beekeepers!; 5) These 10 companies should be prosecuted and shut down. It is anti-national to poison the people of India.
To join the animal welfare movement contact gandhim@nic.in, www.peopleforanimalsindia.org