Can The New China Food Safety Standards Be Enforced?
21 08 2007Can the new food safety standards be enforced?
Reaching an agreement to improve food safety is only the beginning – enforcing it successfully is a much greater problem. Why?
• the tangled web of the Chinese regulatory system – not only do we mean the enforcement of control measures from the central government in Beijing down to the provincial level, but within the various agencies themselves - the SFDA, AQSIQ and a variety of other government bodies involved in food safety. Lacking clarity and direction in the past, many situations were overlooked or ignored. Each province or city made their own rules. To pull it together now on a national basis will be an extraordinary feat. One must question how the government will manage to implement a special inspection system for 90% of the food producers or control the use of additives and pesticides nationwide as they have promised.
As Chinese scholar Huang Jing of the Brookings Institution group in Washington recently stated:
“We know that in China there are hundreds of laws or regulations regarding food safety, but the problem is that the enforcement is very weak, is very arbitrary and is not transparent.”
• Corruption and bribery – Certainly a very strong message was sent when Mr. Zheng, head of the SFDA was put to death so quickly, but corruption is rampant and that will not change. The way it is done may change but the truth of the matter is that the more regulations, the more certifications, the more requirements the more corruption you will find.
(From Noon International’s “The Asian Food Brief”)
Technorati Tags: Noon International, China Food Safety, AQSIQ, SFDA, Huang Jing
