BEIJING - Despite a greater government
effort to monitor food safety in the wake of high
profile contamination incidents, including the
2008 melamine milk poisoning scandal that killed
six infants and made 300,000 ill, the majority of
Chinese still feel insecure about the food they
eat.
"I'm not optimistic about the overall
state of food safety in China," says Zheng
Fengtian, professor at Renmin University, before
listing off recent food scares, including
contaminated cowpeas from Hainan Island, poisonous
crayfish in Nanjing and the liberal use of
recycled cooking oil throughout the country.
"All of these make it impossible for
Chinese people to expect more from food producers
and the government."
China has faced a
number of food scandals in recent years. In
2004, 13 babies died of
malnutrition in Fujian province after being fed a
formula that contained little or no nutritional
value. In 2008, the melamine milk scandal made
international headlines and prompted the US Food
and Drug Administration to establish three offices
in China. (Melamine is a chemical used in making
plastics and when added to milk can make its
protein content appear higher.)
Toxic food
produced in China killed more than 100 people in
Panama in 2006 and thousands of pets died in North
America in 2007 after consuming adulterated wheat
gluten from China.
Responding to the food
safety crises, the government has revised food
safety regulations – passing a Food Safety Law in
2009 – and cracked down on violators. In 2009, a
Chinese court sentenced two people to death in the
melamine milk scandal and, two years earlier, the
country executed Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of
the Sate Food and Drug Administration, for
accepting bribes from drug companies.
The
government has announced the setting up of food
safety monitoring centers in 31 provinces across
China, according to China Daily. The national food
safety work office under the State Council said
food safety tests on agricultural products had
been expanded to 128 medium and large-sized
cities, the newspaper reported.
Despite
these efforts, fake or toxic batches of wine,
mushrooms, bean curd, rice noodles, dairy drinks
and cooking oil have been reported in China in
recent months. In November, another melamine scare
occurred when contaminated dairy products were
discovered in Hunan province.
China faced
an unusually high number of food poisoning
incidents in the first half of last year,
prompting the Ministry of Health to issue a
warning on food poisoning in July, the first time
since the Food Safety Law was passed. From January
to May 2010, there were 2,452 reported cases of
food poisoning and 56 deaths, according to Xinhua
News Agency.
In July, Chen Rui, deputy
director-general of the Bureau of Food Safety
Coordination and Health Supervision of the
Ministry of Health, said the central government is
planning to introduce a new batch of food safety
standards, and will establish national standards
for food safety.
A small but growing
number of farmers are starting or joining organic
farm groups that abide by the community-supported
agriculture model (CSA) model that is used in the
United States. China has about 40 CSA farms and a
recent CSA conference in Beijing attracted more
than 250 people, according to media reports.
Feng Yujun, a researcher at the China Law
Society's Food Safety Legislation Research Center,
lauds the government's efforts to tackle the food
safety issue, but says problems remain - namely
low-quality raw materials used in the production
process and the overuse of food additives and
chemicals.
Feng says China needs to
strengthen punishments and simplify food safety
management and supervision.
"There are
over 10 departments involved in management and
supervision and no unifying food safety
standards," Feng tells Inter Press Service. "The
central government needs to establish a powerful
unified management mechanism."
Nearly 70%
of all Chinese do not believe the food they
consume is safe, according to this year's Consumer
Food Security Confidence Report published by the
Tsinghua University Media Survey Lab and China
Insight Magazine, a state-owned publication.
Over 50% of those surveyed said food
safety should be strengthened; 53% expressed
concern over the quality of food in China; and
15.6% said they don't trust the nation's food
safety at all. Over 60% of respondents said they
do not trust genetically modified foods.
"Food producers have no morals" was the
top reason given for not trusting assertions of
food quality. Despite increasingly strict
supervision of food by the government, many
respondents said China's food producers were still
subject to "inefficient government controls". Only
20.5% of those surveyed thought the government put
enough effort into food supervision, while 42.5%
believed it made little or no effort at all.
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