Confusing messages poison public over food safety

• Source: Global Times
• [22:40 December 03 2009]
• Comments

Facing such a conflict, neither department wants to take responsibility. The testing report is only "responsible for submitted samples."And each testing organization is not responsible for establishing whether the other testing organizations' conclusions or comments are true.

In other words, even though two official testing reports come out with disparate results, both supervising departments do not necessarily need to verify each other's reports. Furthermore, they are not responsible for the overall quality of products, just for submitted samples.

For individual consumers, the war of words in this testing incident contradicts the e§ ects of supervision. An ordinary consumer will not check if a production batch has failed to pass an examination when buying a drink.

Even though one supervising department claims a batch of products is unsafe, consumers may still choose to buy them, if supermarkets continue to sell them and another supervising department approves the products' quality.

Not rare are similar cases, where supervising departments fail to satisfy public needs. In 2006, SKII cosmetics were claimed containing excessive metal content that might cause serious harm.

However, shortly after, another department showed up to clear them of the charge, saying that there was no unifying criteria of metal content in cosmetics yet, and that their cosmetics posed no risk to consumers.

Evian, a famous European brand of mineral water, was discovered to contain an excessive amount of bacteria by a domestic supervising department. However, people soon heard that there were no quality problems, since the World Health Organization did not regard the total amount of bacteria as an quality check index.

Such conflicting results are actually the most dreadful ones. China has passed various laws and regulations on food security control. Nearly 10 policies, laws and regulations have been issued since the tainted milk scandal.

However, the number of laws, regulations and systems is not in proportion to the actual market effect. Specifically, the most important principle of food safety control is to give the public a clear and simple conclusion, rather than leaving the public to judge by themselves whether a product is safe or not. Supervising departments should let the public know whether a product can be used and whether the manufacturers need to undertake legal responsibilities. If a batch of products is found problematic, the measure of taking them o§ the shelves and calling a stop to sales should be automatically initiated. A  The administrative and supervising departments should take on more responsibilities and give clearer messages to ensure public health and safety.

The author is a host with the China Business TV program.

globaltimesopinion@yahoo.com