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Citizens should help to protect food safety

By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-22 13:24

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to explain why having too much of one thing may deprive you of the chance to have some other things. But it may take time for people to realize the loss.

From the ongoing baby formula scandal, Chinese consumers can see clearly that by relying entirely on one or a few government agencies (and a few can be worse than just one) for protection, they may have sacrificed their chance to create more useful citizen-level protection for themselves.

The potential cost of relying too much on administrative force to regulate the market is heavy. At times, bureaucrats fail to deliver their service, just as what the quality inspection officials did (or rather didn't do) with the poisoned baby formula that inundated the Chinese market over the past few years.

China is no longer a society where supply and demand are rigidly planned as in the 1960s. Nor is it a society where most products, if not all, are made according to traditional standards, using crude but acceptably healthy natural materials.

Chemicals are now widely available, with many of them being sold and re-sold without regulation, and used for purposes that they are not supposed to have anything to do with, such as in the baby formula scandal, in which melamine, a kind of plastic, was used as a food additive, and used in heavy dosages.

According to Fang Zhouzi, a Chinese science writer, the chemical can be purchased on the market for a mere 300 yuan ($44) per ton.

Even worse, as exposed in one of his latest articles, the material was openly advertised as "crystallized protein" to be mixed in animal feed and pet food, because it can jack up a product's protein index (but not the real content, of course) in regular tests.

Then, someone stretched their imagination just a little further and thought that the same underhand method could also be used in the production of food for humans.

The unfortunate truth was that all of this, from selling a chemical casually to using it to cheat in animal and pet food tests, then to using it in baby food, all appeared to take place in a lawless vacuum. No one was alerting the public, no media outlets were exposing these cheats and no pressure was being brought to bear on the industry, at least the large corporations, to release information about product quality and shut their doors to poisoned milk.

According to the police, melamine has been added to milk since at least 2005. So in at least three years, little, if not nothing, was done to protect our babies' lives - either by quality inspection officials or by any citizens' group.

Consumers should form stronger organizations to press business to pay more attention to product and service quality. They should have done this earlier to avert the deaths and the suffering and fear in so many families that fed their babies the contaminated formula.

No doubt, after the scandal, the government will draw up stricter laws and standards, and the food industry, in particular, will become more heavily regulated. But as the government draws up new laws and standards, there should also be new initiatives and actions to advocate and protect consumer rights and interests.

Otherwise, in places where bureaucrats are not doing their job, good laws and standards will remain paper tigers. In places where corruption is involved, or departmental turf wars are heavy, consumer interests may be pushed aside.

There has been a lot of discussion in China recently about the "scientific outlook on development", meaning that development should be balanced. It should not be just about the economy, and should benefit social welfare and social harmony. These are great ideas. But in practice, there needs to be another set of balance - that between the actions of government and citizens.