A pesticide banned over health concerns was detected during routine tests on fruit and vegetables in Malta, a new report has found. The report, published by the EU’s food safety agency, says that insecticide chlorpyrifos was detected during scientific tests on a number of fruit and vegetables grown and sold in the country in 2019. At the time the samples were taken, there was a ban on chlorpyrifos products over concerns that it posed neurodevelopment impairment in foetuses and children. The insecticide has been used in agriculture in Malta since 1966 on a wide range of fresh fruit and vegetables. In 2019, an EU study had concluded that the threshold at which chlorpyrifos becomes toxic cannot be determined. Soon afterwards, the government had announced it was banned from use. Malcolm Borg, who heads the farmers’ lobby group, Għaqda Bdiewa Attivi, said the ban on chlorpyrifos had only just come into force when the tests were conducted. This, he noted, meant farmers would have likely been trying to use up a stock of the chemical they had invested in when the tests were done. The European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) report also says that legal action was taken against an...