From the Readers

Food safety a permanent mission

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-08 07:28

There are two main reasons why food safety scandals occur so frequently.

First, producers are too obsessed with profit to care for people's lives. To save costs, some of them even use contaminated, unsafe and thus cheaper materials as substitutes for the approved, safe and comparatively more expensive stuff. To make chickens and ducks grow faster and fatter, they add synthetic hormones to their feed. To make fish grow faster, they feed them malachite green. To save money, they use banned chemicals in milk products. The list is long.

Second, food safety supervision is weak. Food safety supervisors swing into action only after a food scandal breaks out, and pledge to investigate the incident and implement tougher rules and regulations to ensure food safety.

The very purpose of setting up a food safety supervision administration is to have in place a flawless system that would ensure that only safe food reaches the market.

But it seems some of the officials forget this objective and treat food safety supervision as a periodic task rather than a permanent mission. If they do their job properly in the first place, no contaminated or substandard food product would reach the market even if some producers were trying to push them through.

We cannot count on producers to make only safe and quality products.

But we can expect food inspectors to ensure such products do not reach the market and compromise people's health.

Pan Zhining, via e-mail

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