Unreliable Testing, Untraceable Origins — Can the Compliance Commitment Certificate Improve Food Safety?
Over the past few years, media reports have been rife with cases of market vendors being fined for selling Chinese chives, celery and other produce with pesticide residue levels exceeding permitted limits — fines ranging from as little as 5,000 yuan to tens of thousands.
The high-end supermarkets and mid-to-high-end e-commerce platforms on which the government and the public pin great hopes for food safety appear to perform little better than the so-called “low-end” wet markets. This year, the public-interest organisation Zirantian organised consumers to purchase vegetables from several e-commerce platforms and submit them for testing. The results revealed that vegetables from JD’s 7Fresh, Alibaba’s Hema, Meituan Maicai and other platforms all had pesticide residue levels exceeding permitted limits — the highest by 55 times — and some even contained nationally banned highly toxic pesticides.
The government, of course, is not going to sit and wait for its people to kill themselves. Since 2008, successive governments and leaders have repeatedly made high-profile statements that food safety is their greatest concern.
How can food safety be guaranteed? How can the basic minimum of “pesticide residue levels within permitted limits” be ensured? The latest answer from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs is: through the “Compliance Commitment Certificate”.
On 27 October this year, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs issued the Administrative Measures for Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Compliance Commitment Certificates (Draft for Public Comment), requiring that agricultural products sold by agricultural production enterprises, farmers’ professional cooperatives, as well as entities or individuals engaged in purchasing agricultural products shall be accompanied by a Compliance Commitment Certificate issued in accordance with regulations, to guarantee that the products do not contain prohibited drugs or illegal additives, and that conventional pesticide and veterinary drug residue levels do not exceed permitted limits.
The new rules also impose requirements on entities and individuals engaged in purchasing agricultural products: in addition to checking the certificates issued by producers upon purchase, if agricultural products are repackaged or blended after purchase, a new Compliance Commitment Certificate must be issued.
The 2022 revised Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Law has already written the “Compliance Commitment Certificate” into law; what is being issued now is the implementing regulation following that legislation.
So, can this “Compliance Commitment Certificate” actually resolve the safety problems of agricultural products?
I. Unreliable Testing
Starting in 2016, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs led pilot programmes for the Compliance Commitment Certificate in selected regions, transitioning to a nationwide trial in 2019. Throughout the entire trial period, the core principle of the certificate has been to base issuance solely on the producer’s own commitment. Producers need only declare that they do not use “banned pesticides and veterinary drugs, discontinued veterinary drugs, or illegal additives”, and that “conventional pesticide and veterinary drug residue levels do not exceed permitted limits”.
However, in the latest draft for public comment now published, the “self-declaration” option has disappeared. Under this version of the draft, producers or purchasers who wish to prove that they have not used prohibited drugs must satisfy one of the following: “quality and safety control meets requirements”, “passes self-conducted testing”, or “passes commissioned testing”. In other words, they must either have a set of written enterprise regulations in place, or continuously carry out testing.
Shifting from subjective declarations to objective test results may appear to raise the standard, but assuming that the mere words “passes testing” mean food is safe clearly underestimates the complexities of pesticide residue testing.
The simplest pesticide residue testing cards on the market cost less than 1 yuan at cost and can only detect organophosphorus and carbamate pesticides — a class of highly toxic pesticides that is gradually being phased out under national regulation.
For comprehensive testing, one must either set up an in-house testing laboratory staffed with qualified professionals, or purchase services from a testing company. Such testing can provide residue data for dozens or even hundreds of pesticides, but costs range from a few hundred yuan to well over a thousand yuan.
Constrained by cost, the routine spot checks currently carried out at large wholesale markets and wet markets are limited to sampled vegetables upon entry, and all rely on lower-precision rapid testing methods. It is simply not yet feasible to cover every base.
Different crops are susceptible to different pests and diseases, requiring different pesticides, and pesticide formulations themselves are being constantly updated and replaced. Ordinary farmers find it difficult to understand what ingredients their pesticides contain, what harm those ingredients cause, or how to apply pesticides rationally to ensure residue levels stay within permitted limits.
As a result, compared with the wide range of pesticides actually in use, the items that various spot checks can cover are inevitably far from exhaustive.
Worse still, wherever there are regulations, loopholes are sure to follow. Ordinary consumers and laypeople alike — and even regulatory authorities — can easily be misled by results manipulated through technical subtleties.
In July this year, the public-interest organisation Zirantian discovered that celery sold at Hema in Beijing had been detected with chlorpyrifos residues exceeding the permitted limit by 4.6 times, and filed a report with the government authorities. The Dongsheng Town Market Regulation Station in Haidian District responded that Hema had provided multiple documents, including inspection reports, demonstrating no violation of the Food Safety Law, and declined to open a formal case for investigation and sanction. But on closer inspection, the inspection reports provided by Hema did not include chlorpyrifos as a test item at all.
It is difficult to say which link in the chain — the supplier, the testing agency, Hema, or the Market Regulation Station — was playing games with consumers, faced as they all were with celery already detected to contain chlorpyrifos, a banned pesticide, at levels exceeding permitted limits.
II. Untraceable Origins
For many years, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has been working to establish a produce traceability system, and the Compliance Commitment Certificate forms an important component of it. Following the passage of the Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Law last year, the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress told reporters that the purpose of establishing the Compliance Commitment Certificate system was to ensure that “production records can be accessed, product distribution can be tracked, and accountability can be clearly assigned”. In other words, alongside testing as a quality gate, the other mechanism is to pursue accountability through traceability.
Yet the greatest obstacle facing traceability is the complex distribution network through which agricultural products pass.
Although consumers have grown accustomed to seeing origin information on supermarket shelves or e-commerce platforms — sometimes down to the specific production base — extending this model of traceability to the mainstream wholesale system is not realistic.
According to data from the Third National Agricultural Census, smallholder farmers account for over 98% of all agricultural business entities in China, and the cultivated land area they operate accounts for 70% of the national total. It is the wholesale distributors and retailers at every level within the wholesale system who bring produce grown by smallholders to dinner tables across the nation. This includes purchasing agents who buy crops at the farm gate, primary wholesalers who transport produce across provinces, and secondary and tertiary wholesalers who take over once goods arrive at major wholesale markets.
As a result, the vegetables consumers buy in markets, supermarkets, and online in big cities have very likely changed hands four or five times. Along this chain, produce from different producers is inevitably blended or repackaged for sale; middlemen engaged in vegetable purchasing typically buy produce from dozens of smallholders, blend it together, and then distribute it across various channels.
The vegetables at a small street stall may well come from dozens of different smallholder farmers. A QR code on a supermarket shelf might tell you which production base the produce came from, but it is rare to find one that identifies which individual producer actually grew it.
The new rules do, in fact, acknowledge how difficult it is to trace produce back to smallholders. During earlier pilot programmes, family farms were once encouraged to issue compliance certificates, but the results were probably underwhelming, so this time around, when the formal legislation was drafted, they were simply left out — only agricultural production enterprises and farmers’ professional cooperatives are now required to issue certificates.
Since tracing back to smallholders is so difficult, the new draft for public comment has chosen to pass the pressure onto purchasers: “Entities and individuals engaged in purchasing agricultural products at the place of production shall, in addition to checking the certificates issued by producers at the point of purchase, issue a new Compliance Commitment Certificate if the agricultural products are repackaged or blended after purchase.” The grounds for issuing the certificate remain the same three options: “quality and safety control meets requirements”, “passes self-conducted testing”, or “passes commissioned testing”.
In other words, middlemen who go out to the countryside to buy produce from smallholders will, if they wish to operate in compliance, probably need to carry testing equipment with them and test on the spot as they buy. Yet even if purchasing agents go to extraordinary lengths to carry out testing and issue the required documentation, a certificate issued after blending can still only identify who did the purchasing — it cannot reveal who actually grew each bundle of vegetables.
So how much does the certificate genuinely contribute to traceability?
Although the certificate offers little value for traceability, its deterrent effect on middlemen is considerable. Article 23 of the new draft for public comment stipulates that when edible agricultural products accompanied by a Compliance Commitment Certificate are found by spot check to contain banned pesticides and veterinary drugs, discontinued veterinary drugs, or illegal additives, or to exceed permitted levels of conventional pesticide and veterinary drug residues, heavier penalties shall be imposed.
The regulations do add that those “who can truthfully explain the source from which the produce was purchased or procured” may be exempted from punishment, but for middlemen who are out at the farm gates every day, sorting out which vegetable belongs to which farmer is the least likely task imaginable. Are farmers going to be expected to put a fingerprint on every single cabbage from now on?
Back in reality, these purchasing agents who spend all year buying vegetables from smallholders at the farm gates have neither the obligation to monitor farmers on the government’s behalf nor any way to vouch for the safety of the produce they handle.
If the ultimate aim of these fines is to improve agricultural production, the pressure still fails to reach the producers, and it is hard to see how this could change the status quo of excessive pesticide use at source.
III. Smallholders and Small Traders: Inescapable Realities
Yet reality has done nothing to curb those in authority from imagining a system that is “highly efficient and fully traceable”. They seem unwilling to consider whether such a vision can ever actually be realised.
Experts who study food safety often say that “there are too many small-scale producers” is one reason China’s food safety management is so difficult — as though if smallholders and wet markets were simply eliminated, and everything became large-scale farms and big supermarkets, the problem would sort itself out. Year after year the facts prove them wrong, yet this mental habit endures.
After all, in some people’s eyes, the health code system could make over a billion two-legged people line up every day, willingly opening their mouths for a swab — so how much harder could it possibly be to “stick a code” on vegetables that cannot even move?
Without smallholders, who will farm all that scattered land? Without the vast network of small middlemen, who will serve dispersed smallholders? Without them, is China’s food supply still guaranteed? Food safety may be no more, but food security could well become the problem.
A more realistic scenario is this: as the entire system comes to rely ever more heavily on “test reports” and “management regulations” to govern produce safety, it will be companies with the capacity to draft documents and issue certificates that gradually come to dominate the market. Smallholders and small-scale middlemen will either have to attach themselves to those companies or be pushed to the margins, until they are slowly squeezed out of the formal market altogether.
Online fresh-produce platforms operate on the same logic, leveraging scale and channel advantages to consolidate the market rapidly. Yet these seemingly “more regulated” fresh-food e-commerce sites have still been unable to guarantee food safety — the all-too-frequent reports of vegetable residue exceedances are proof enough.
IV. Rather Than Chasing a Dead End, It’s Time to Rethink Regulation
Yasuda later published his doctoral research on China’s food safety governance as a book titled On Feeding the Mass. He argued that a key conflict underpins the making of food safety policy: whether limited resources should go into a handful of model demonstrations or into the entire population of small-scale producers.
The resources today’s government can deploy far exceed those available back then — in some areas, township-level “grid workers” have even been assigned to monitor produce quality and safety — yet the problem remains much the same: Do we need to maintain a system that appears to “function flawlessly” — one in which every regulatory policy can be enforced, gradually pushing a segment of the population out of sight, until they are invisible to those in charge? Or should we develop more genuinely workable policies for the dispersed smallholders and small traders, and raise the basic floor of food safety?
Take the pesticide and veterinary drug residues that the new certificate rules are most concerned with. Beyond stricter management and harsher penalties, consider the pork slaughter and quarantine system: despite having been in place for years, does it provide training on the safe use of drugs, teaching farmers how to use fewer of them? Has anyone ever trained farmers in improving soil and environmental conditions so that plants stay healthy, truly reducing drug use at its roots? In the various farmer training programmes, e-commerce livestreaming and how-to-sell techniques are trumpeted to the skies, and those who promote chemical fertilisers and pesticides run travelling roadshows every week — but who actually cares about using less?
What if we tried a different angle? The informal markets that have always been looked down upon for being “unlicensed” — could they perhaps offer a lesson or two for the complex challenge of food safety governance?
Although China’s pork slaughter and quarantine system has been in place for years, unlicensed slaughter persists in rural areas, with meat sold through the most “primitive” informal channels: among neighbours, through door-to-door peddling, and at rural market fairs.
In a small workshop in a renowned food destination in Guangdong, beef freshly slaughtered that very morning is turned into the area’s famous beef balls within two hours of the kill. These workshops operate from slaughter to production without any of the various government-issued licences, yet locals have never been seen refusing a beloved local delicacy simply because of the missing paperwork.
Is this kind of spontaneously generated mutual trust not far more reliable than a certificate? Should local governments also draw on some “local wisdom” and encourage trust-driven short-chain production-and-sales models at every stage — production, processing, retail, and consumption?
At the very least, this would be far better than a worthless certificate. It would spare people the burden of compulsively leaving a paper trail through self-deception — whether the ledgers they are asked to fill in are on paper, in Excel, on a mini-program, or in an app — or being driven to falsify records altogether.
A final note: the Administrative Measures for Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Compliance Commitment Certificates (Draft for Public Comment) will close to public comments on 27 November. We encourage you all to make your voices heard through official channels in the few hours remaining, and we welcome your ideas and advice for the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in the comments section below.
Whole-process people’s democracy starts with each of us.
How to Submit Your Comments
2. Visit the website of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (URL: www.moa.gov.cn), go to the “Public Comments” sub-section under the “Interactive” menu at the top, and click on the “Notice of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs on Soliciting Public Comments on the Administrative Measures for Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Compliance Commitment Certificates (Draft for Public Comment)” to submit your comments.
3. Email: fgslfc@163.com
4. Postal address: Supervision Division, Department of Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Supervision, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, No. 11 Nongzhanguan Nanli, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100125
The deadline for submitting comments is 27 November 2023.
To read the full text of the draft for public comment, please click the “Read Original” link here.
References
https://www.moa.gov.cn/govpublic/ncpzlaq/202310/t20231027_6439161.htm
“Hema in Exceedance Again! Consumer-Submitted Green Beans Found with Carbofuran, a High-Risk Restricted Pesticide, Above Permitted Limits”
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cDVYbjh9NlL87IGT_oPLKw
“Follow-up on Report of Celery with Chlorpyrifos Residues Exceeding Permitted Levels: Market Regulation Bureaus in Two Areas with Exceedances Decline to File Cases”
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uqO-xpnugzcBHhByloz12A
“Revised Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Law Adopted by Vote; Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress Answers Reporters’ Questions”