Control of Use of Pesticides and Their Impact on Consumer Health

Dear Colleagues,

Agrochemicals, a leading international, peer-reviewed, open access journal, welcomes submissions for a Special Issue focusing on the control of the use of pesticides and their effects on consumer health.

At the current technological level, pesticides are required in large-scale food production in order to obtain sufficient and good-quality food. Inherently toxic pesticides are deliberately applied, and in most cases, their residues should remain in/on the target objects in order to deliver the desired functions. This raises food and environmental safety concerns. Therefore, their residues are regularly monitored in food and environmental samples in order to control their safe and efficient use. Reliable and accurate results can only be obtained by analysing representative samples with fully validated methods in combination with efficient internal quality control. Such results can be employed to assess the safe and efficient application of pesticides, the dietary exposure of consumers and, if necessary, make regulatory measures to limit potential risks.

This Special Issue provides a forum for publishing results and linking them together to enable their joint evaluation for making the best of their utilization. Moreover, it aims to cover research and comprehensive reviews on the practical use, monitoring, and impact of pesticides, with a particular focus on the following issues:

1. Pesticide residue monitoring in food and feed:
   • Report the results of pesticide residue monitoring in food and feed commodities;
   • Assess the compliance of residue levels with national and or targeted export market MRLs.
2. Multiple pesticide residues in samples of food commodities:
   • Detail the occurrence of multiple pesticide residues in food samples;
   • Discuss multi-residue methods that can identify and quantify unknown pesticide residues present at concentrations below 0.01 mg/kg;
   • Explore the uptake of residues from soil by subsequent crops;
   • Study the decline rate of pesticide active substances from the time of their last application to the time of harvest.
3. Evaluation of the plant protection practice:
   • Analyze the ongoing plant protection practice considering the types and concentrations of pesticide residues detected in plant commodities.
4. Estimation of consumer exposure:
   • Estimate the exposure of consumers to pesticide residues based on the results of analyses of samples taken at the markets or fields at the time of harvest.
5. Field trials on Speciality Crops:
   • Conduct field trials on specialty crops to collect data for establishing MRLs or assessing the suitability of MRLs for related major crops;
   • Design experiments in line with the OECD Guidance Document on Crop Field Trials No. 66, 2nd ed. 2016 https://doi.org/10.1787/2794fdd6-en.
6. Quality Control in Analytical Process
   • Report the quality control of regular analytical processes and verify the method performance parameters, particularly their long-term reproducibility based on using incurred residues.

Prof. Dr. Árpád Ámbrus
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agrochemicals is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• pesticide residues, food, feed and environmental samples
• compliance with national and export MRLs
• quality control of analytical methods
• assessment of consumers’ exposure