"Without chemical, world people will be starving". "Which will consumer chose, ugly chemical free fruitattacked by insects and diseases or beautiful fruit controlled by chemicals?" This reality affects the attitude of growers and say " If we don't use enough chemicals, we cannot produce marketable fruits".
In order to protect consumers from chemicals Welfare Ministry set the standard of Maximum Residue Level (MRL) for each food product.MRL is decided according to ADI (Allowed Daily Intake), consumptionand degrading ratio. However, the standard is generouse for demestic products and strict for foreignones. It gives impression that they cannot trust some foreign countries, however we cannot help thinking that the truth is "Consumers have taken already a quite few chemicals from demestic products and there is not enough room left for imported products".
Rather than conplaining against national policy, we decided to handle the matter agressively and proudlyas follows with the idea that our imported products are far more safe than Japanese products.We put IP (Identified Preservation) handling into practice in advanced countries. This is the system based on strict segregation of safe fruits from susceptible ones and handle them separately from the farm to the port of export. In some case we put the marking on each tree for perfect segregation.
In some countries of South Asia, identification of safe fruits itself is difficult due to lack of transparency of the spray manner. In order to cope with the problem, we send the fruit sample of each consignment to Japanese laboratory by air to inspect more than 200 items of chemicals. For a microanalysis such as 0.01 ppm, we thought it's necessary to rely on Japanese laboratory whose accuracy is renowned.
We take rice grain as an example to understand how 0.01 ppm is extremely small quantities. It is just one grain out of 100 million of grains. This is a substantial ban to use. However we stopped saying just "Don't use" and we started to study together with growers to find out the best alternative measures.
We consider it very important and started to run a pilot farm for this objective.
As the harvest period of mango is very short, we need to purchase fruits from different farm almost every week, which means "the better cultivation method" must spread all over the region. We are looking forward to the day will come and stop the extensive residue test.