Society and Life

Food for thought

By Xing Zhigang (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 10:09

An old Chinese saying dating back to over 2,000 years says food is all-important to the people. But 20 centuries later, Chinese citizens are still grappling with several food safety concerns.

In 2011, a popular short message titled A Day for an Ordinary Chinese among mobile phone users says: "The Chinese eat fried bread stick made with sewage oil and drink milk tainted with melamine for breakfast; lunch includes pork polluted with lean meat powder and expired steamed buns dyed with forbidden coloring; dishes for supper are toxic bean sprouts and fish fed with contraceptive pills."

Though exaggerated, it tells the growing anxiety among the public about food safety amid a spate of food scandals.

The fear about food safety has apparently left my mother in puzzlement about what's safe to eat. What should I buy, she asks other family members and also herself every time she goes shopping. She recalls that food safety was not a problem at all during the 1960s and 1970s although people had much fewer food options to choose from.

Such concerns are also voiced by top government officials like Vice-Premier Wang Qishan. He feels ashamed about the emergence of food safety problems, he said in March at a panel discussion during the annual session of the National People's Congress.

On April 14 this year, Premier Wen Jiabao denounced the recent food safety incidents as a show of how serious the moral decline and loss of integrity in society have been. It is true that moral degradation can cause grave and even disastrous consequences in the food sector. But we cannot entrust food safety, or the safety of any other industry, to the moral consciousness of these practitioners. Effective supervision is the best way to ensure the healthy development of any industry as shown by successful practices in other countries and regions.

It's unfair to say the government has not paid attention to food safety. There have been more than 100 laws and regulations on food safety supervision and nearly 3,000 industrial standards for the food sector. Meanwhile, the nation has also established a comprehensive administrative management mechanism for food safety supervision, with dozens of departments such as the ministries of health, agriculture and commerce sharing the responsibility for ensuring food safety.

With such a fine combination of legal framework and administration system, why does the country still suffer from rampant food safety violations?

The real problem may have resulted from our excessive confidence in the power of the government in supervising the food industry. If we are over dependent on the government supervisory system, any glitch in it may lead to serious public health crisis.

There are many loopholes in the current supervisory and administrative mechanism as food supervision is divided over a dozen government agencies, resulting in unclear responsibilities for each, much buck-passing. Some supervisory bureaus even earn profits from fines and charges.

So the top priority at present is to supervise the "supervisors" by giving full play to industrial associations, non-government organizations, consumers' associations and media organizations. We need their active participation to check and balance the government food supervisory agencies to ensure we get an early warning if any fault happens in the supervisory system.

Xing Zhigang is deputy director of the News Center of China Daily.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page9)