Over the past few months, China has repeatedly been hit by food safety scandals, including tainted steamed buns, contaminated pork, and beef extract. It has been two years since China’s government declared food safety a national priority, just when the melamine-contaminated baby milk scandal sickened 300,000 infants and killed at least 6. Since then, China’s government has threatened, punished and arrested a great many illegal food processors.
However, the outbreak of a stomachturning string of food-safety scandals makes it clear that official efforts are falling short in terms of food safety regulation. In recent months, news media have reported sales of pork adulterated with the drug clenbuterol, which can cause heart palpitations; pork sold as beef after it was soaked in borax, a detergent additive; rice contaminated with cadmium, a heavy metal discharged by smelters; popcorn and mushrooms treated with fluorescent bleach; bean sprouts tainted with an animal antibiotic; and wine diluted with sugared water and chemicals. Even eggs, seemingly sacrosanct in their shells, have turned out not to be eggs at all but man-made concoctions of chemicals, gelatin and paraffin.
As a result, people in China feel nothing is safe to eat. They don’t know what choices to make. They are really feeling very helpless.
Scandals are frequently happening, in part, because producers operate in an environment in which illegal additives are everywhere and cost-effective. Manufacturers calculate correctly that the odds of profiting from unsafe practices far exceed the odds of getting caught, according to experts. China’s explosive growth has spawned tens of thousands of food producers nationwide, and statistics show that fourfifths of them employ 10 or fewer workers, making regulation extremely difficult.
Even, food safety scandals made China’s top officials feel uncomfortable. “All of these nasty cases of food safety problems are enough to show that lack of integrity and moral decline have become a very serious problem,”Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in mid-April, according to The People’s Daily.
“We feel really ashamed,” Vice Premier Wang Qishan said at a meeting in March, according to Xinhua news agency. “Just when the people have enough to feed themselves, we have this food safety problem. Really embarrassing, this is really embarrassing for us.”
However, one thing deserves our attention is the fact that some progress has been made. China has adopted a far-reaching food safety law since 2009 and is bringing hundreds of standards in line with international norms. Up to now, nearly half of dairy food companies have been ordered to halt production after failing to meet new licensing requirements.
But, it is hard to do a good job if there is no efficiency and cooperation. The health minister, Chen Zhu, said in February that China did not have enough enforcement agents, with less than one food inspector for every 10,000 people. Instead of systematically identifying the safety risks and forcing producers to prove that they have eliminated them, Chinese inspectors have to randomly sample and test

products.
Furthermore, food safety regulation remains dispatched among different public sectors. For example, the Commerce Ministry supervises pork producers, but beef and poultry slaughters fall under the supervisions of the Agriculture Ministry.
As a matter of fact, behind the food safety crisis hides a credit crisis, which is actually caused by the food production model. At present, consumers cannot achieve self-supervision, but the existing industrial chain is not reliable. Solution to food safety problems ultimately depends on a new food credit system.
It is indeed very important to strengthen regulation on food safety. However, regulation has limited effects. It’s difficult to have a regulator physically present at every site of production. It is impossible to assign a quality supervisor to every site of food production and processing. The act of adding poison to food is still going on. The rule of money first helps exacerbate moral decline. Nowadays people are not ashamed of doing things unethical, but afraid of being caught. Therefore, to re-establish credit system is the fundamental solution to the food safety problem in China.