Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) of food, or simply “food fraud,” occurs in a wide variety of products such as fish, spices, oils and dairy products.
Food fraud amounts to a $10-15 billion per-year-problem in the food industry and ranges from intentionally mislabeling food to adding inferior or foreign substances to a food for economic gain.
Certain food products can be particularly susceptible to EMA due to market pricing, quality assurance testing methodologies or even trade policies. One of those food products is honey. In recent years, quality assurance in global honey supplies has been hampered by a number of issues.
Colony collapse disorder, an unidentified syndrome in honeybees, has led to dramatic reductions in domestic honey production across the U.S. As a result, honey importation has increased; by 2011 almost 70% of the honey used in the U.S. was imported.
Since 1994, the U.S. has maintained anti-dumping tariffs on honey from China. This means that the USITC determined that Chinese honey was being sold in the U.S. at less-than-fair value and had the potential to cause material injury to the domestic honey market. The additional border tariffs meant Chinese honey became more expensive to import than honey from other countries, creating a large incentive to ship Chinese honey through intermediate countries and change the declared country-of-origin labeling to avoid these tariffs.
This is called transshipment or “honey laundering.”
Chinese honey has also been contaminated with unapproved antibiotics, providing an additional incentive for transshipment to conceal the true country of origin. Honey has already been known to have a long history of adulteration with cheaper sweeteners, such as high-fructose corn syrup or rice syrup, meaning additional additives only contributes to the overall problem.
So, what does this mean for the consumer?
The good news is that EMA in honey rarely results in health problems. Adulteration of bulk honey supplies used by food companies to manufacture products such as bread or cereal may affect the company’s bottom line, but consumers are unlikely to notice a difference. The percentage of adulterated honey in a final food product is so small that quality changes would not be detectable and health problems are extremely unlikely. For consumers who are determined to spread only 100% pure honey on their toast for breakfast, the best option may be to find a respected brand name or a local supplier.
Note: A big thanks to the University of Minnesota’s National Center for Food Protection and Defense blog, where this post first appeared.
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