The Council on Foreign Relations has a backgrounder on China’s food safety regime that provides a useful summary of the current situation, China’s Troubled Food and Drug Trade. Four sentences stand out.
Of the nearly one million food processing factories, 70 percent are food workshops with fewer than ten employees.
This degree of fragmentation of the industry would make it a nightmare to regulate anywhere.
In the United States, food safety is also enforced through a variety of other means, including a punitive torts system, independent media, and vigorous civil society organizations. These institutions in China are not nearly as powerful…
Some see signs of change here, notably in the media’s role in exposing the melamine-tainted dairy products scandal. But the jury is still out.
… a common belief in China is that the “ultra-competitive business environment” means companies cannot survive without breaking the rules. Companies that do use good business practices are seen to be at an economic disadvantage…
Consumers and regulators have to make sure there are no wages of sin, and that means consumers having reliable information so they can vote with their wallets (as they have been doing with dairy products) and regulators not being too cozy or, worse, in cahoots with the regulated (see sentence 2 above).
….food from India is more likely to fail (U.S. safety inspections) than food from China. Illnesses from food in the United States more often originate domestically…
The U.S. doesn’t allow meat and poultry imports from China because U.S. law requires importers to meet the same standards as U.S. producers, so that may skew the comparisons in China’s favor but the broad point is that China is not alone in having food safety standard issues. Not that that doesn’t make dealing with them necessary and urgent.
