Food Safety in Asia

“With the 2013 restructuring, China’s food safety regulatory system has changed from separate regulation to centralized and unified supervision, which is a great and progressive improvement from the past,” Dr. Wu says.

On April 24, 2015, the NPC approved and released the amended FSL, which will become effective on Oct. 1, 2015. Hailed as China’s strictest food safety law to date, the law requires food industry companies to establish a self-examination system and ensure that their food is traceable. Moreover, online food retailers will be held liable if they can’t provide to consumers the correct name, address, and contact information of a food distributor.

Not surprisingly, updated regulations governing the production of infant formula are much stricter. Specifically, infant formula manufacturers are now required to provide for the provincial CFDA a list of their raw materials, additives, labels, and relevant information for report filing; they must register their product formulas with the CFDA and submit supporting research materials.

Also among the most noteworthy changes to the FSL are the addition of shipping and storage to the FSL’s coverage, changes to streamline the regulation of dietary supplement products, their claims and their ingredients, plus increased administrative, civil, and criminal penalties for regulatory violations.

Chemical Issues

“Food safety issues in China share some global commonness, such as foodborne diseases,” Dr. Wu says. “But China has food safety issues that are particular to this country.”

Topping the list, excessive and inefficient uses of chemical fertilizers are outstanding problems. “The application rate of chemical fertilizers in agricultural production in China ranks number one in the world,” Dr. Wu relates. “The application of chemical fertilizers increased from 42.538 million metric tonnes in 2001 to 55.617 million metric tonnes in 2010, representing an increase of 30 percent over 10 years. However, the efficiency of fertilizer use is low in China.” (One metric tonne equals 2,204.6 U.S. pounds.)

For example, Dr. Wu notes, with regard to the extent of application, even with less than 10 percent of the global arable land, China accounts for one-third of the global nitrogen fertilizer application amount. The average nitrogen use efficiency is approximately 45 percent in China, well below the 60 percent of developed countries.

Excessive and inefficient applications of chemical fertilizers have destroyed the Chinese agricultural ecological environment, along with sustainability, Dr. Wu says. “As a result, residues of nitrates, nitrites, heavy metals, and other harmful substances in edible agricultural products far exceed the allowable limit, causing harm to human health,” he elaborates. “Due to the habitual dependency on chemical fertilizers, as well as the limited supply of organic fertilizers and many other constraints, it is still difficult for agricultural producers in China to effectively reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and adopt science-based fertilization techniques on a large scale in the short term.”

Compounding the chemical fertilizer issues, abuse of chemical pesticides worsens the ecological environment in China and severely affects the safety and quality of the country’s edible agricultural products, Dr. Wu says. “As the Chinese government continues to increase subsidies to support agriculture, agricultural producers have been greatly motivated,” he points out. “However, chemical pesticide application has also substantially increased.”

According to Dr. Wu, the Chinese government has banned the use of highly toxic, highly residual, carcinogenic, teratogenic, and/or mutagenic pesticides and requires rigid adherence to the safe application standards and rational application guidelines of pesticides. “Nonetheless,” he says, “banned/prohibited pesticides continue to be used in actual agricultural production, and pesticide abuse violating the safe application standards and rational application guidelines of pesticides remains widespread.”

Heavy metal pollution of soil is a serious threat to the quality and safety of China’s agricultural products, Dr. Wu continues. “With the rapid development of industrialization, heavy metal pollution of the soil in China is increasing both in severity and area, resulting in incalculable losses to the growth of crops and damage to the quality and safety of agricultural products,” he says. “It is estimated that an average of 150 heavy metal pollution incidents occur every year in China.”