Fining street vendors won’t solve food safety issues | Roundtable Recap

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Key Takeaways
  • Food safety issues can arise at any stage of the chain. If regulation in other areas fails to keep pace, relying solely on heavy fines for individual vendors is merely treating the symptoms rather than the cause and cannot solve the root problem of food safety.
  • For a long time, China has prioritised quantity over quality in agricultural security. Without shifting this mindset, it will be difficult to see any significant improvement in food safety regulation.
  • Food traceability is a vital tool for strengthening food safety, but it is difficult to implement in practice: firstly, the sheer volume of information and the lack of specific standards make interconnectivity difficult; secondly, while traceability is manageable for larger farms, it is far more challenging for smallholders.
  • Without accurate information, many pesticide residue tests are effectively blind. They rely on guesswork regarding which pesticides farmers might use. If the guess is accurate, the test is valuable; if not, the effort is wasted.
A farmer in Zhejiang was fined 50,000 yuan for selling home-slaughtered pork with a profit of 700 yuan; an elderly man in Luoyang, Henan, was fined 110,000 yuan for a profit of 21 yuan from selling vegetables; several restaurants were fined 5,000 yuan for adding shredded cucumber to *liangpi* (cold skin noodles)… Recent news has been rife with such examples. Behind these exorbitant fines lies a deep-seated public anxiety regarding food safety. Is the produce in wet markets safe? What regulatory tools are actually in place? As consumers, beyond relying on regulatory systems, how else can we better protect what ends up on our dinner tables?

On 27 July, Foodthink, in collaboration with Tencent News’ “Let’s Chat Science”, invited anthropologist Zhong Shuru, who researches wet markets and sustainable food systems; expert lawyer Zhang Xueming, Executive Director and Deputy Secretary-General of the Beijing Food and Drug Safety Legal Research Association; and rural entrepreneur Li Jie, to explore “safety on our plates” from the perspectives of legal regulation, food traceability, and practical shopping knowledge.

Foodthink will publish the edited transcripts of this roundtable discussion in two parts this weekend. This is the first part.

This discussion also follows our recent involvement in the revision of the “Administrative Measures for the Supervision and Management of the Quality and Safety of Edible Agricultural Products Market Sales”. Our suggestions were adopted in this revision, meaning that “dried fish, dried vegetables, and dried fruits” can continue to be sold. Our future laws and regulations will be more “accommodating” toward small-scale farmers who produce and sell their own goods.

Roundtable Guests

Zhang Xueming

Expert lawyer, Executive Director and Deputy Secretary-General of the Beijing Food and Drug Safety Legal Research Association.

 

 

Zhong Shuru

Anthropologist researching wet markets and sustainable food systems.

 

 

Li Jie

Cooperative leader and rural entrepreneur, formerly a village-based worker.

 

 

Moderator

Wang Hao

Editor at Foodthink.

 

 

I. Why is food safety regulation so difficult?

Wang Hao
Recently, an elderly vegetable vendor in Luoyang, Henan, was fined 110,000 yuan for selling vegetables with excessive pesticide residues, despite making a profit of only 21.05 yuan (although this penalty was overturned on appeal). Some argue that food safety is a matter of utmost importance and that heavy fines are necessary for deterrence; others believe this is a case of “disproportionate punishment” resulting from rigid law enforcement. So, what is the actual situation for small vendors regarding food safety? Are they even capable of resolving the quality issues of the vegetables they sell?
Zhong Shuru: First of all, individual vegetable vendors may not know if the produce they are selling contains pesticide residues, unless they grew it themselves. I have visited many vegetable markets across the country and found that the origins of the produce on market stalls are highly complex. Some may be grown by the vendor or a nearby farm and brought directly to the stall; others may come from wholesale markets, and wholesaling can involve many levels. Some come directly from a large wholesaler, while others pass through second- or third-tier wholesalers, changing hands several times before reaching the stall. Consequently, the vendor may be entirely unaware of the background information. If a vendor is heavily fined without any prior knowledge, they are indeed quite innocent. It must be understood that food safety issues can occur at any stage. The most likely stage is production—the planting phase. However, problems can also arise during storage or sale, especially with seafood and cooked foods, where improper handling—whether intentional or accidental—during processing or preservation can lead to food safety issues. There are differences in how law enforcement is carried out in different regions. In some places, when a problem is found, they trace it back to the vendor’s supplier; in others, the fine is issued directly to the vendor.

When supervision of other stages fails to keep pace, simply issuing heavy fines to individual vendors or attempting to constrain them through procurement vouchers is merely treating the symptoms rather than the cause; it cannot solve the food safety problem.

Wang Hao
The new ‘Measures for the Supervision and Administration of the Quality and Safety of Edible Agricultural Products Market Sales’ also require centralised vegetable markets to conduct spot checks on agricultural products that lack quality compliance certificates, allowing them to be sold only after passing. What is the current state of this type of supervision in vegetable markets?
Zhong Shuru: Overall, because the supply chains are long and the channels complex, supervising food safety is indeed quite complicated. The new administrative measures require centralised markets to carry out spot checks on produce from small vendors. As I understand it, there are two types of spot checks in the markets. One is routine sampling: every market has its own testing team, trained by government departments. Every day, they use specialised test strips to sample different categories of agricultural products and upload the records; any problems found must be dealt with promptly. The other is surprise inspections, conducted by higher-level enforcement agencies (the Market Supervision Administration). These surprise checks are carried out without prior notice and serve as an important barrier for food safety in vegetable markets. Furthermore, food traceability is also a crucial means of enhancing food safety. I know that some prefecture-level cities in Guangdong previously wanted to establish city-wide traceability systems. For instance, by scanning a code in front of any market stall, one could see which channel the produce took, which wholesale stages it passed through, and how it reached the stall—potentially even identifying the place of origin, and in an ideal scenario, tracing it back to a specific farm. Unfortunately, this traceability system is difficult to implement in practice. It is hard to achieve information interoperability between different prefecture-level cities and large wholesale markets; there are also differences in traceability across markets, which prevents information from being transferred effectively, making it easy for the data chain to break.

Li Jie: Regarding the traceability of agricultural products, as someone who manages a farmers’ cooperative in a village, I feel that farms of a certain scale are relatively easy to trace. However, if you are dealing with smallholder farmers, traceability becomes extremely difficult. For example, with our loofah cultivation, each household only plants a tiny plot of land, and the fertilisers and pesticides used by each family differ. Even the chemicals used this time might differ from those used last time. Therefore, this kind of traceability supervision is very challenging for smallholder farmers.

● This year, national standards for pesticide residues in various foods have been revised. Foodthink previously examined the implications of the relaxation of standards for chives. For more details, see ‘Pesticide residue standards eased 24-fold: can we still eat chives with peace of mind?‘
Wang Hao
As an expert involved in the revision of the Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Law of the People’s Republic of China, how do you view the current difficulties facing the supervision of agricultural product food safety?
Zhang Xueming: I began researching the revision of the *Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Law of the People’s Republic of China* seven or eight years ago. Two years ago, I also had the honour of participating in the revision and demonstration work jointly organised by the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. The supervision of agricultural product quality is divided into two main parts: the production stage is supervised by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, while the distribution stage is managed by the market supervision system—namely, the Market Bureau. This division of supervisory responsibilities may have made the challenges of food safety supervision even more complex.

The biggest difficulty in supervising the production of agricultural products is actually a matter of perception. China is a populous nation of 1.4 billion people, and the primary challenge was first and foremost how to ensure everyone had enough to eat. Consequently, for a long time, ensuring quantity has taken precedence over ensuring quality. When assessing the performance of relevant officials, the main focus was on whether yields increased or decreased. In terms of mindset, quantity came first and quality second; more often than not, quality was sacrificed for quantity. Therefore, the first step in improving quality supervision at the production stage is to change this perception. Unless we move away from this mindset of prioritising quantity over quality, it will be difficult to see any significant improvement in food safety supervision.

As for supervision in the distribution sector, the biggest issue is information. The primary tool for market supervision departments to monitor quality and safety is testing. For instance, issues like excessive pesticide or veterinary drug residues require testing to confirm. However, there are a vast number of pesticide varieties—nearly 3,000. According to 2015 customs data, there were over a thousand types of imported pesticides alone. With so many options available to farmers, can the supervisory authorities possibly test for every single one? Even testing just 20 to 30 types would make the cost and time investment prohibitively high. Thus, without accurate information, much of our testing is essentially blind. We can only guess which pesticides a farmer might have used based on experience. Generally, there is a certain logic to which crops attract which pests and what drugs are needed. If the judgment is accurate, the test is valuable; if it is wrong, the test may have been a waste of effort. Therefore, obtaining accurate medication information is crucial.

Who holds the information on exactly which drugs were used on agricultural products? The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs system manages everything from the production and sale of pesticides—wholesale and retail—to the final use by the farmer; in principle, this should be traceable. Therefore, to resolve food safety supervision issues, we must strengthen the cooperation between agricultural and market supervision departments. When agricultural departments conduct quality monitoring, they should share that information with market regulators. I raised this point during the demonstration meetings: supervisory information must be shared. Articles 13 and 15 of the newly promulgated *Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Law* reflect this. However, as the law has only just been revised, the specific operational details will take time. Furthermore, because it involves two different departments, the State Council will certainly need to issue specific measures regarding the sharing of monitoring information.

Speaking of information sharing, there is also the food safety traceability system mentioned by Teacher Zhong. For the sake of food safety, both regulators and consumers hope to understand exactly where an agricultural product has come from at every step. But currently, traceability in the food sector is indeed quite difficult, primarily because there are no specific standards for it. The volume of information in the food sector is enormous, requiring massive databases. Without a unified standard, even if individual units implement some traceability, they remain ‘information islands’, unable to effectively integrate information across different regions and stages. There is even the risk of grey-market trading of QR codes, which has previously been exposed by the media.

Additionally, within the realm of information issues, there is the matter of food packaging. For example, inaccurate labels can lead to safety problems. If a food product contains sugar but this is not stated on the label, a diabetic patient could face complications after consuming it. Similarly, if certain elements are not clearly listed in the ingredients, a consumer with an allergy to those substances could be put in danger.

II. How can ordinary people protect their own dining tables?

Wang Hao
As discussed, there are indeed many challenges and issues remaining in China’s food safety regulation and governance. Beyond hoping for effective adjustments to systems such as regulation and legislation by the government, what measures can we, as ordinary consumers, take to safeguard our own dining tables? I would now like to ask our experts to share, from a consumer’s perspective, how they deal with food safety issues.
Zhong Shuru: In daily life, consumers are actually in a rather passive position. Firstly, there is the matter of mindset. I have interviewed many consumers and I feel that their attitude towards food safety is essentially one of resignation: this is the current state of affairs, it is hard to change, and if a problem occurs, it is just their bad luck… This kind of mentality is very common, which is equivalent to surrendering the precious right to maintain one’s own dietary safety. Therefore, regardless of the current situation, we must maintain a proactive attitude, increase our awareness of food safety, and strive to take control of our own diets. We must not easily leave the decision of what we eat in the hands of others. Those with the means to cook should try to do so as much as possible; if you always eat out, neither the ingredients nor the processing are under your control, making problems more likely to arise.

Furthermore, to eat safely, healthily, and well, consumers must improve their discernment and discover better food channels. For example, I love visiting traditional wet markets, where I try to choose local, seasonal ingredients. I also encourage building long-term buying habits with vendors you know to establish a relationship of mutual trust; this is also a strategy.

Additionally, beyond wet markets, one can pay more attention to and learn about channels from small-scale producers like Li Jie, purchasing ecological and organic ingredients to improve the quality of one’s diet.

● Market vendors are experts in their trade every day; building a good relationship with them can also provide knowledge and information about food. See the previous article by Foodthink author Zhong Shuru, “Why Do We Need Wet Markets? An Anthropologist’s Field Observations”. Photography: Kong Xiaoyan
Zhang Xueming: As consumers, to safeguard our own tables, we can study the relevant food safety laws more closely, so that when problems arise, we can use legal means to protect our legitimate rights and interests. Additionally, consumers should proactively seek out food safety knowledge, learning how to read food labels and ingredients lists to develop their own set of effective experiences. When possible, it is also useful to learn more about agriculture—for instance, choosing seasonal fruits and vegetables and avoiding those grown out of season. Take pesticide residues, for example; because there are so many types of chemicals that might be used, proving that something is safe or unsafe is very difficult. In a situation with limited information, we can try to choose vegetables and fruits that use little or no pesticide. This requires us to understand the characteristics of these crops: what pests they might encounter during growth, which pesticides might be used, at what stage, and in what quantity. In fact, farmers know best which vegetables are safe; by learning more from them and studying these crops thoroughly, we can build our own knowledge base for dining safety.

Many people say every day that food safety must be tackled at the source. But where is the real source? This is not just a matter for the Food and Drug Administration and the Market Supervision Bureau, nor is it just an agricultural issue; it involves many administrative departments and is a matter of social co-governance. In addition to making the food safety supervision and governance systems more rational, consumers also need to take action themselves, establishing their own knowledge of food to guarantee our food security.

Compiled by: Hu YunwenUnless otherwise stated, images are from Foodthink

Originally published in Tencent News “Let’s Chat Science”

Republished with permission by the Foodthink official account

Editor: Wang Hao

Published by Foodthink