Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jul 26 2006 (IPS) – It was only after a sharp rise in the number of patients with the same symptoms in southern Serbian town Leskovac that doctors began to look for the cause.
More than 200 patients said they had eaten tomatoes sold at a tenth of the usual price. The tomatoes were sent for examination, and initial lab results showed that patients had suffered poisoning, most probably from the excessive doses of pesticides.
After that, the question is getting louder in Serbia: What do we really eat?
This is destroying the myth of Serbia being a home for healthily grown food, leading agriculture analyst Zaharije Trnavcevic told IPS. Re-integration into European trends and greed for quick profits, plus the lack of adequate control and regulation are taking their toll.
For almost a decade spent in isolation and under a strict international trade embargo in the 1990s, Serbia was unable to import fertilisers or pesticides, or food additives for livestock and poultry.
This led to years of healthily grown food. Most small farmers, the basis of Serbian agriculture, turned to the traditional ways of their grandparents using manure and hand picking weeds, among other things. Livestock and poultry were fed with traditional food.
The political turn that came with the downfall of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 led to hasty, uncontrolled re-introduction of modern agricultural means and technologies. Fertilisers and pesticides and various conservation substances are now being administered in abundance.
The changes became immediately visible. Juicy local tomatoes were replaced by rapidly grown thick-skinned ones that almost lack substance, as a buyer said. The same goes for new cucumbers that started tasting like watermelons. White cauliflower and green broccoli differ in colour only.
Spinach leaves now look unnaturally large, so do green peas; corn does not taste sweet when boiled. Sweet potatoes are not sweet either. Onions are not hot any more, garlic loses its chubby look in a matter of days. New types of apples, pears and plums have flooded the local markets.
No chicken is being fed now with home grown maize, while pigs are being fast-fed with some nutrition substances that make them grow too fat and big too quickly, Trnavcevic says.
Consumers say meats have lost their taste. And all the carrots are the same size, said Marijana Jankovic, a Belgrade housewife. I wonder where these people get the seeds from.
It is hard to answer that question, there are no official records. Many companies are importing seeds from all over, with little control in place. One official said such crops come as foreign donations for Serbian farmers.
Both consumers and experts blame the hunger for quick profit.
We are all falling victims of technological optimism, without seeing how important it is to keep biological diversity alive, Prof. Aleksandar Petrovic told IPS. Petrovic is a member of the national commission for cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Culture Organisation (UNESCO) within the Man and Biosphere programme.
Globalisation in this area is dangerous, imposing a kind of technological dependence which should be avoided, he added.
Little has been done in this field since 2000, and it was only after strong protests from experts that genetically modified (GM) soy fields were destroyed by police some years ago.
Serbia is not the only country facing such problems. Similar questions are being raised in Croatia, which has a bustling tourism business based on offers of home grown food.
The Vecernji List daily suggested in a recent report that 90 percent of healthy food products in Croatian food halls do not fall into the claimed categories. The paper said farmers are simply copying labels on to their products.
You don t really know what you re eating and where it comes from, food expert Prof. Ivica Kisic was quoted as saying.
The amount of ecologically produced hard cheese in the Lika region from capital Zagreb to the Adriatic coast would suggest there are some 20,000 cows around, he said. But there are no more than 200. Such large amounts of cheese cannot be really organic, of course.
