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Part III: Obstacle
Article 4
The Challenges for Food Safety in China
Current legislation is unable to protect consumers from the consequences of unscrupulous food production
By Bian Yongmin
[Paraphrase 7]
After a long time fighting food shortages, China has been self-sufficient in food since 1995. But in the Action Plan on Food Safety published by China’s Ministry of Health (MOH) on August 14th 2003, the government classes the following current risks relevant to food safety in China as “very serious”: 1) Food-induced illnesses remain the supreme danger for public health; 2) New biological and chemical pollutants in food; 3) New food technologies and materials (such as transgenic food) raise new challenges; 4) The capacity for self-management among food producers is weak; 5) Food terrorism; 6) Slow food safety supervision by government organs. A number of scandals during 2002 illustrate the severity of the situation. The government is facing pressure from consumer demand for safe food. Moreover, since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), food imports and exports have increased, and disputes about food safety have arisen between China and its trading partners. The European Union has refused Chinese food many times for reasons of safety. These refusals not only cause huge losses of goods, they also discourage future transactions. How to ensure food safety has as a consequence become a government priority.
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Enforcement
Distorted administrative regime
In China there is no unified administrative organ with the authority to deal with all the issues relating to food safety. The MOH seems to be the most important organ for the governing of food safety, however, the MOA, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (GAQSIQ), State Administration for Industry and Commence (SAIC), the State Environmental Protection Administration, the Ministry of Commerce (MOC, formerly the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation), and the State Grain Administration, etc. also have jurisdiction over food issues, and/or supervise food producers. All these organs need to make detailed rules to tackle the issues in relation to their remit as well as within the scope of their respective powers. This is one reason why the 1995 Food Hygiene Law does not provide rules for planting and breeding, which are the responsibility of the MOA. The 1993 Administrative Measures on the Safety of Transgenic Engineering is silent on trade of transgenic products as this is the remit of the Ministry of Commerce. In fact superfluous laws and regulations impair rather than enhance administration on food safety, and increase law enforcement costs, leaving food producers confused.
The involvement of so many authorities also cause problems of co-ordination from enactment to enforcement. The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) was instituted in 2003, with the mandate, inter alia, to integrate the administration and supervision of food safety, co-ordinate and organize investigation and impose penalties for serious violations of the law. The SFDA, however, has no teeth. Its powers relating to food safety are held by other ministries and agencies, while the SFDA itself is a semi-ministry. It has to co-ordinate among several ministries that have a higher administrative rank. When there is a conflict between these organs, the SFDA’s decisions or opinions have no power and are unlikely to be executed.
So far its main progress made relating to food safety is its Food and Drug Safety Reassurance Programme, which demands that the MOA, MOH, GAQSIQ, SAIC, MOC, Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and the General Administration of Customs (CGA) should, within their respective scope, take steps to ensure food safety. Yet it is almost impossible for the SFDA to successfully fulfil its co-ordination mission while so much overlap and separate jurisdictions remain.
For example, the MOH is entitled to grant a hygiene license to a food producer, which is an essential measure to ensure food safety. Meanwhile, since 2002 GAQSIQ has been entitled to grant safety licenses to food producers. In the MOH’s view GAQSIQ’s safety licenses are unnecessary. After the MOA published several administrative measures relating to GMOs, the MOH also enacted The Administrative Measures on the Hygiene of GM Food. In fact, different organs often make their own plans relating to food safety, a situation where overlap or conflict is common.
Green Food is governed by the Centre of Green Food, affiliated to the MOA, while organic food is governed by the Centre of Organic Food, affiliated to the State Environmental Protection Administration. The standards for Class AA green food are almost the same as those for organic food. In practice they compete with each other. This situation is wasteful of the resources of the state. Similarly, the safety of GM agricultural products is governed by the MOA, while the safety of normal food products is governed by the MOH.
This disordered situation will not easily be improved in the near future, because it relates to the redistribution of powers among different organs, a difficult move. Moreover, the administration of food is in itself especially difficult, particularly for China, with the world’s largest population.
Inefficient administration through punishment
The main administrative work done by administrative organs is inspecting, several times a year, compliance with the Food Hygiene Law. The government does not attach enough importance to supervise the course of food production, or to help food producers increase their own capacity to ensure food safety. Most inspection work is about finding and punishing those food producers that break the law. The 1995 Food Hygiene Law does not prescribe the obligations of food producers to ensure food safety, yet penalties for breach are clearly stipulated. In 2002 such inspections covered 98% of food producers. Those found to be involved in illegal activity were punished, fined or had their licenses revoked, etc.
Other schemes or programmes which may work well to enhance food safety, such as taking a from-land-to-table approach, recalling of products not meeting standards, etc., and enhancing the traceability of food, etc. Penalties per se are neither an effective nor sufficient means of ensuring food safety. Solely announcing that the banning of certain pesticides will not guarantee food safety. Such pesticides must be recalled and destroyed to ensure their trade and use cannot continue.
Trade interests
The improvement of food safety is not only driven by safety concerns, but also by trade interests. Although this may not be true in all countries (it is the case in many countries), China seems to give more weight to trade. One purpose of the administration of food hygiene is to support food exportation because China produces more agricultural products than it needs. In accordance with the Action Plan on Food Safety published by the MOH in September 2003, the government will “modify food safety regulations and standards from time to time to ensure that food hygiene regulations and standards meet the needs of food importation and exportation to protect consumer health”. This approach may be typical in many developing countries.
The enforcement of GM safety regulations sheds light on China’s concerns about trade interests in the field of food safety. After the promulgation of The Administrative Labelling Measures, the MOA published the first list of GMO to be labelled. On this important list, only five categories of transgenic organisms, soya, maize, cotton, tomato and rapeseeds, are required to be labelled. Even for these five categories, not all products that include them must be labelled. Take soya as an example. According to this list, only five soya products required labelling. Soy milk, soy sauce and beancurd are not included. If safety were top priority, labelling of all food containing a certain percentage of GMO ingredients would be required. Soy sauce and beancurd are consumed extensively in China. Made using certain traditional Chinese methods, they are seldom imported from other countries. But if this is why they are not required to be labelled even if made using transgenic soya, the government’s concern about GMOs seems disingenuous.
The 2002 Administrative Labelling Measures also have application to imported products. However, until the summer of 2003, the government did not inspect products in its domestic market for compliance with the labelling measures. It was found that almost all transgenic soy oil producers breached this labelling rule before they were forced to comply through this inspection. But other GM food remained unlabelled in supermarkets up to the end of 2003.
In addition, the Administrative Labelling Measures did not clearly specify the minimum amount of any one transgenic ingredient in a product before this must be labelled. Thus it is not clear whether a mix of transgenic products with traditional products shall be labelled. Such mixing is more frequent in domestic products than in imported products.
[1404 words]
[The Rest]
Problems associated with rapid industrialization
Although the government has done much to enforce and supervise the application of the food hygiene law, the food safety situation in China today remains unsatisfactory. In 2001 more than 19,000 people were poisoned in 611 food poisoning cases. In 2002 more than 11,000 people were poisoned in 464 food poisoning cases. It is surprising that most poisoning cases occurred in families due to unsafe food products.
A large amount of unsafe foods are produced in areas that are no more rural but not yet urban, where the governance from both countryside and cities is weak. Following the process of industrialization, cities expand as do the areas between the countryside and cities. However, governance by the municipal administrations has not yet expanded accordingly to the boundary of cities, on the other hand, the governance of villages is rapidly declining as farmers are losing their land. Many illegal food producers rent houses in these special areas to produce or process food and sell them in the city markets.
The case of “swill oil” (ganshui you) or “drain oil” (digou you) is typical. It is said that in the suburbs of Peking alone, there may be more than 1,000 producers refining this kind of oil. Some producers may have been there for more than thirty years although the Peking Administration of Environmental Protection has cracked down many times. Moreover, to deal with one case of oil from swill, several organs have to act together, because the MOH is in charge of swill, the AEP is in charge of waste water and SAIC is in charge of business licenses. This also explains how the problem of over-administration impedes the administration of food safety.
Source: Harvard Business Review
Now the SFDA has decided to enhance the administration in the grey zones between the cities and the countryside. But so far there are no special measures targeting administration in this jumbled area.
The MOH published a very ambitious Action Plan for Food Safety, which sets out a series of goals for food safety to be reached before or by 2008. But it is highly questionable as to whether the MOH can bring food safety to all Chinese with its limited powers and under the current legal framework for food safety.
The 1995 Food Hygiene Law does not cover planting and breeding, which are the remit of the MOA. Nevertheless, the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in planting and animal medicines and hormones in breeding has caused many problems in agricultural products. China is the largest consumer of chemical fertilizers in the world. Pesticides are heavily used in planting, of them 70% are very poisonous. Several pesticides now forbidden in the European Union are still in use in China. Pesticide residues on vegetables are so common and so dense that many hygiene experts suggest washing vegetables first then dunking them in hot water before cooking or eating them. The power to administrate chemical fertilizers, pesticides and animal medicines is in the hands of the MOA, who is also the main user and beneficiary. The MOA should supervise the process of planting and breeding. The new Regulations on the Safety of Agricultural Products, which are still in their early stage of drafting, are to be enacted by the authority.
Although the chain from land to table has been cut into several administrative sections, the MOH seems decided to do its best in its own section. The 1995 Food Hygiene Law provides some important rules to ensure food safety in a simple way, something that easily causes confusion in their implementation. Now the MOH has determined to enact detailed regulations for the implementation of the 1995 Food Hygiene Law during 2004-5. A series of regulations and normative documents have been put on the legislative agenda by the MOH, including The Administrative Rules on Sample Inspections of Food Hygiene, The Administrative Rules on Nutrition Labelling on Food, amending and publishing 316 food standards and enacting new standards such as standards on the maximum of residues of 19 chemical pollutants in various agricultural products and food, etc.
Over-administration, where several organs have the power to administrate the production and sale of food, will remain the most difficult problem in the implementation and supervision of food safety law and regulations. It is a major challenge for the state to establish a mechanism that will enable different bureaucracies to work efficiently and effectively in co-operation. Just like in the above-mentioned swill case, if the relative organs cannot act at the same time, illegal producers will escape.
There were a total 382,737 food producing or processing entities in China in 2002. Most were medium-sized or small, from which most food with safety problems originated. Although Chinese are becoming rich, the average income of urban residents is only 716 yuan (US$86) a month, which is much higher than that of rural residents. The large number of low income residents are a stable contingent and major consumers of poor quality food. “Swill oil” is targeted at such consumers. In 2002 the MOH inspected 505,084 food producers including cafeterias and restaurants nationwide, 13.68% of those inspected were found in breach of the law. Given China’s vast size, how to supervise so many small food producers is a massive challenge for the government. This is a common challenge for most developing countries, where most food producers are medium-sized or small businesses, lacking the ability and resources to implement self-management in food safety.
China began to regulate food safety immediately following the resolution of its food shortages. Yet China has not established a legal system efficient in ensuring food safety. Many problems are rooted in the administration regime and China’s priority of economic development. Following China’s integration into the international community, food safety in China has already improved. However, a lot of work still needs to be done both in terms of legislation and implementation.
[983 words]
Source: China Perspectives
http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/819 |
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发表于 2013-12-26 22:57:43
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