May 16, 2011

 

China gives press more freedom for food safety

 

 

China's usually strict censors are allowing the country's press more freedom in order to help monitor a food industry long riddled with problems.

 

The central government has been cautiously encouraging a sudden burst in food safety reporting. This is in contrast to before the new food safety campaign, when local officials would delay or quash reports on food safety, or when the provincial government had to give permission for the coverage of food scandals, said Peter Leedham, a China-based food testing executive.

 

"It was very tightly controlled. That seems to have gone now. There's much more openness," said Leedham, the managing director of Eurofins Technology Service in Suzhou.

 

Few think the looser controls on food reporting signal a broader reform of Chinese media, which remains strictly controlled by the ruling Communist Party. Blogging and publishing are also muzzled, and those who challenge the government risk being harassed or detained. Some, like the writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, have been convicted of inciting to subvert state power for their dissident writings. Liu is currently serving an 11-year prison term.

 

"Is it a US-style openness?" said Christopher Hickey, the USDA's country director for China. "Clearly not, but I do think it's one of these areas where there is a limited amount of freedom, more than there was in the past."

 

Chang Ping, a former columnist fired from the gutsy Southern Metropolis Weekly for his critiques, said reporters have long had a freer hand on food troubles as long as they portray them as isolated rather, than systemic problems.

 

"The reports may look very free, but in fact they don't push anyone to really consider the root causes of what's going on," said Chang.

 

Still, the shift underscores official alarm over the scope of China's food safety problem and a recognition that government inspectors alone aren't going to be able to tackle it.

 

Zhang Yong, the director of the executive office of the new Cabinet-level Food Safety Commission, recently praised the media's "important watchdog role" after being asked why journalists are frequently able to find food safety problems before inspectors.

 

Many challenges lie in the way of cleaning up the rampant use of illegal additives and drugs, which are often churned out by makeshift chemical factories, making them particularly hard to trace.

 

Too many agencies oversee food safety, penalties for violations are too light and local officials lack sufficient incentives to crackdown on businesses in their area that produce bad food.

 

The problems persist despite a crisis in 2008 when six babies died and 300,000 were sickened from drinking infant formula or other dairy tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. The scandal prompted the government to overhaul how it polices food, forming a Cabinet-level food safety commission and passing a comprehensive new food safety law.

 

"The melamine scandal really served as a real wake-up call in the area of food safety both for the Chinese public and the Chinese government," said Hickey, the U.S. FDA official.

 

In response, the government introduced reforms that addressed a patchwork of imprecise and out-of-date standards, promised stepped-up food chain supervision from farm to fork and scrapped inspection exemptions for "famous brands." But since the government does not release detailed data about outbreaks of food-related illness, or product recalls, it is difficult to measure the progress of these efforts.