China offers a plan in wake of poisoned-food scandals

Domestic consumers, not foreign press, led to China's new food-safety strategy.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 8, 2007 edition

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Beijing - Battered by a wave of poisoned-food scandals around the world, China this week unveiled a new plan to improve its food and drug safety that promised "severe punishment" for producers of fake or poor quality food.

"Guaranteeing the safety of all publicly available foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals must be the alpha and omega of all our work," the five-year plan declared. It pledged to uphold international safety inspection standards and threatened public blacklists of "untrustworthy" food and drug producers.

Though the recent food scares abroad may have prompted the timing of the new plan's release, its content was aimed more at domestic consumers.

"The external factors helped push things along," says David Zweig, head of the Center for China's Transnational Relations at Hong Kong's University of Science and Technology. "But the driving force behind this is the fact that Chinese have been dying for quite a while" from tainted food and drugs.

Chinese consumers have long been familiar with local food producers' trickery, and the government drew up its new plan to combat the problem in April, before the spate of critical foreign press reports.

A survey published last December by "Xiao Kang," a state-run monthly aimed at government officials, found that 92.7 percent of respondents said that they "always worry that the food they buy is unsafe."

Ninety-seven percent complained that "the government's food safety policies are not effective," and 84 percent declared themselves "dissatisfied with the level of food-safety monitoring."

The authorities went some way toward answering widespread public concerns last week, when a former head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration was sentenced to death for accepting bribes. Fake antibiotics that his agency had approved killed 10 people.

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