New Recipe for Food Safety

Closing loopholes in food safety regulation By Li Li

Baby formula products with Hero Nutradefense labels were taken off store shelves in many cities on the Chinese mainland and removed from major online shopping websites immediately after a television report exposed the brand’s safety issues on March 28.

National broadcaster CCTV reported that Import and Export Co., an authorized dealer of major Swiss baby formula maker Hero Group,allegedly mixed expired milk powder into Nutradefense products, changed production and expiration dates and repackaged them.

The latest baby formula scare again highlights the loopholes in China’s food safety regulatory system while dealing another blow to consumers’ con fi dence in the country’s dairy products.

Xile Li’er is suspected of smuggling baby formula powder made only for the European market by Hero Group and repackaging it as Nutradefense baby formula, for which the company had a legal import certificate, the Administrative Committee of the Suzhou Industrial Park in east China’s Jiangsu Province,where the company is located, said at a press conference on March 28.

According to the committee, of the 17 batches of baby formula products with the Nutradefense label that had been tested by food safety authorities, at least seven failed to meet protein standards.

The quality supervision authorities in Suzhou closed down Xile Li’er’s production line in November 2012, as the company did not have a license for food production, the CCTV report said. Despite the closure, the company’s milk powder products were still on sale in many cities on the Chinese mainland until the end of March. Many consumers were enraged about the time gap, leading many to question the state of the food safety regulatory system.

China’s food industry has already been tainted in recent years by a number of scandals,including pesticide-tainted vegetables, pork contaminated with clenbuterol or chemically reconstituted to resemble beef, and oil scooped up from the gutters and resold to eateries.

The worst scandal occurred in 2008 when the melamine-tainted baby formula caused at least six infant deaths and sickened 300,000 others.

The founding of the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) during the latest cabinet restructuring in March is widely seen as a broader government effort to recover the crippling damage dealt to consumer con fi dence in China’s food safety by fixing the weak links of the regulatory system.

The CFDA, which started operations on March 22, is a ministerial-level agency that has integrated regulatory functions of the State Council’s Food Safety Office, the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) as well as food-related regulatory duties from the General Administration of Quality Supervision,Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC).

People have long blamed insuf fi cient communication and coordination among different government departments with duties on food safety for regulatory loopholes and the buckpassing among them in the wake of scandals.Prior to the restructuring, the SFDA was in charge of food safety in the catering industry,whereas the responsibilities of food safety regulation in the manufacturing process and market were assumed by the AQSIQ and the SAIC, respectively.

The new regulator, however, will be responsible for supervising the full process of food’s production, circulation and consumption.

According to the CFDA’s organizational structure issued on March 31, the new watchdog’s function of supervising food safety has been intensified compared with its predecessors.

Out of the 17 departments directly under the new regulator, three departments are put in charge of food safety regulation. They respectively undertake the responsibilities of analyzing food safety risks during the production and distribution procedures and making suggestions about reducing these risks, supervising local governments to discover and correct the practices that may jeopardize food safety, as well as analyzing statistics on food safety, issuing warnings, organizing cross-department information sharing and formulating risk-monitoring plans.

Meanwhile, the CFDA will appoint a chief food safety supervisor.

Wang Yukai, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said that as food safety regulation requires expertise in certain fi elds,candidates for this position must have strong academic backgrounds as well as rich management experience.

The CFDA also has also set up 10 positions for food and drug inspectors, who will be charged with the task of supervising local law enforcement on food safety.

New departments of the CFDA also include the Department of Media and Communication,the Department of Legal Affairs and the Policy Studies Of fi ce, whose duties used to be fu lfi lled by the Department of Policies and Regulations in the SFDA.

Local governments should take the overall responsibility for food safety of local residents,according to the State Council’s restructuring plan.

The State Council issued a plan to streamline the national food safety regulatory system during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-15)last July, which demands that local food safety regulators at provincial, city and county levels be equipped with standardized facilities by the end of 2015. It also emphasizes the responsibility of governments at county level and above for local food safety regulation.

Zheng Fengtian, Vice Dean of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at the Beijing-based Renmin University of China,told Economic Information Daily that local governments might ignore certain food safety risks to protect enterprises in the areas under their respective jurisdiction. For example, in a county whose economy heavily relies on its agricultural sector, government of fi cials tend to intentionally overlook unsafe production procedures in local farm produce processing companies as most products are sold out of the county.

Pilot reforms

UNDER SCRUTINY: Food safety inspectors in Shushan District, Hefei City in Anhui Province, test the quality of edible oil used by a cafeteria in Anhui Agricultural University during a random inspection of school canteens

Since the beginning of 2010, the Chinese Government has launched three different pilot programs aimed at reforming local food safety regulatory systems in southern Guangdong Province, northwestern Shaanxi Province and northern Tianjin Municipality.

In Shenzhen and Shunde in Guangdong,the food safety authority is put under the market supervision bureau and charged with the tasks of drafting local regulations and supervising food production, circulation, catering industry and quality of edible farm produce.

In another reform in Shaanxi’s Weinan City,all functions concerning food safety under government departments of agriculture, animal husbandry, quality supervision, industry and commerce administration and health have been transferred to the local food and drug bureau, which is in charge of issues involving administrative licensing, law enforcement and technical tests.

The reform in Binhai New Area in Tianjin is widely seen as the direct inspiration for the reform on food safety regulatory system at the national level. Inside sources told Economic Information Daily that the reform in Shenzhen and Shunde was deemed too timid while Weinan’s model was deemed too drastic.

Zhang Tiejun, Director of Binhai’s Food and Drug Bureau, said that during the reform, the regulation of catering businesses, nutritional additives, cosmetics and hygienic conditions of public venues previously under health authorities, the regulation of food production previously under quality supervision authorities and the regulation of food circulation previously under the industry and commerce administration authorities, have all been transferred to his agency. Another component of the reform is the establishment of a food product- and drugtracing system, which is used to monitor the procedures of the supply of raw materials,processing, circulation and end consumption.

Under Binhai’s model, an extensive network of food and drug regulation covering all villages and urban communities has been established.Zhang said that all 27 townships and sub-districts in Binhai have a food and drug regulatory station, which employs full-time coordinators.He added that all the 351 villages and communities have a liaison of fi ce for food and drug safety issues, along with a part-time information officer. Supervisors from Zhang’s bureau are stationed in every township and sub-district to ensure laws are enforced at the basic level.

While Binhai’s model has proved effective during the pilot program, copying it in other places of China faces some challenges, ranging from a large number of food and drug safety personnel required, to the huge amount of money needed to set up a food-tracing system and the difficulties of monitoring food safety in the vast rural areas, according to Economic Information Daily. ■