Experts point out that western nations faced similar problems in the past, but that the number of cases in China is shocking nonetheless.
Food tracking is a common method for boosting food safety. Li Yongjing said that if you buy a pear in America, you can easily find out which farm it came from; if you buy a tin of pears, you can find out where the additives were sourced. But in China, this is almost impossible.
In the United States, large or medium-sized firms dominate every part of the food industry. But in China, agricultural products, meat and milk come from a myriad of small farms. Instead of the stable supplier relationships seen in many western nations, Chinese foodstuffs are bought and sold by numerous individuals and traders. Food products are made by individuals and in small workshops. Tens of thousands of small and medium businesses compete in a game of survival of the fittest.
A long supply chain stretches between China’s farms and its dinner tables: there are too many employers, too many products, too many points of sale and too many consumers.
Eight or nine authorities – agricultural, industrial and commercial, quality supervision, health and more – struggle to regulate the sector. Many food-safety experts say that the cost of a food traceability system is more than the Chinese market will accept. But Zhu Yi is adamant that, if China wants to build a safe food industry, this is what it needs.
Li Yongjing and Zhu Yi both said that the Chinese public is inadequately educated about food safety. In the west, unsafe foods do occasionally appear, but are rarely chosen by consumers, and these cases attract little interest – consumers themselves decide that excessively cheap food is likely to be unsafe, they said. But in China, while upmarket food brands have been growing for years, the reality is that they still have small market share and the bulk of consumers are very much price-led.
At a more basic level, China’s penalties for producing harmful foods are too light, and the guilty are rarely caught. Internationally, it is understood that food needs to be regulated – but more, that you cannot stop victims from seeking judicial redress. Otherwise, Zhu Yi asks, how are we to prevent China’s food market from becoming a race to the bottom?
