Food Security and Food Safety for the Twenty-first Century by Soraj Hongladarom

Author:Soraj Hongladarom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

15.2 Reasons for Concern About the Process of Food Production in China

Food safety is on the public agenda in China. We argue that there are four main reasons why this attention is legitimate and even needs further reflection. The first reason refers to the importance of the China’s agricultural civilization and its international role in agriculture and food production. China is a great country with a long history of agricultural civilization. In China, 630 million people live in the rural area, which is about 46 % of the overall national population in 2013 (National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China 2014). The agricultural production scales are large, and a wide variety of agricultural products are produced. For China, this is of the utmost importance given its population of about 1.3 billion people. Consequently, next to food security, food safety has always been a fundamental concern of the Chinese government. As an old Chinese proverb goes, “Food is of primary importance for everyone (民以食为天)” which clearly reflects the significance of food production in traditional Chinese culture.

The discussion also touches upon the role China plays in the international context. Especially since China has become a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the discussion on health and food safety has a clear international dimension that is directly linked to questions of trade. As a WTO member and a market player that wishes to improve its access to foreign markets, China has to comply to the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures that sets out a “best practices” regulatory model with which national food safety regulation must comply. Other WTO members however questioned whether the food policy of China abides by the rules of the WTO on food safety (Prévost 2012). These accusations turned out to be a significant impetus for far-reaching reforms and resulted in the need to establish policy and regulation that improve the food chain supervision as soon as possible. This development would not only benefit the food export but also is very important to the Chinese people.

The second reason for our concern is the frequent and malicious food safety incidents. With the fast and ongoing process of industrialization and urbanization in China, vicious food safety incidents frequently happened in China. One of the most striking examples has been the melamine scandal in September 2008. It turned out that milk and infant formula had been adulterated with melamine, an ingredient that leads to kidney stones and other renal failure, especially among young children. This “poisonous milk powder incident” or “melamine contamination event” had a huge impact. On the one hand, the scandal got a lot of attention because of its tragic results. According to the Chinese Health Ministry, 296,000 children were affected by milk powder. From these children, 52,898 babies had been treated in hospital for kidney problems that were caused by melamine. On top of this, the death of six infants was directly linked to the tainted milk (Ministry of Health 2009). Furthermore, the impact

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