Issues with China’s food quality and standards.Nicola Hawley

It was a simple demonstration of a serious problem. At China’s National People’sCongress on March 6 2013, a delegate from Zhejiang took out some dark peanuts,prized for their rich flavor, and dropped them in a glass of clear water. The waterimmediately turned black from the chemical dye coating the nuts. “This is not a show. Iwant people to see how these toxic additives are proliferating and harmful,” said ZhuZhangjin, who brought more than 300 different samples of doctored food products toBeijing, according to the Qianjiang Evening News, a daily, on March 7.

Background

China’s food safety record has been a topic of considerable discussion since the newmillennium and has included everything from food contaminated with dangerous

chemicals, nutritionally substandard food and evenfake food. With a population fast approaching 1.4billion, the food supply chain needs to be able toprovide safe and good quality food in very largequantities.This is despite the demands of rapid industrialisation,

modernisation and associated pressures such as theuse of agricultural land for other uses, freshwaterdeficits and soil quality issues (approx. 10% of arableland contaminated with heavy metals and chemicals).Adding to this, globalisation has led to increaseddemand for animal food products in Chinese dietsleading to crops being used for animal feed.

Graph illustrating increase in demand for dairyproducts 2006 onwards.

Problems

Within the country there are many different regional food systems operating anddifferent food industries. The patterns of consumption vary enormously from one part ofthe country to another in terms of ethnicity, age, gender and socio economic status,with the wealthy consumers enjoying more choice whilst being exposed to longer supplychains and the poorer areas haveless choice but often relatively safer local food chains.

These disparities in the food system are the major problems facing the government andthe provision of a safe food supply. See Table 1.

Past examples of contaminated food have included pesticide soaked pork (2003),carcinogens in frying oil (2007), melamine contaminated baby milk (2008) and evenexploding water melons!

Liu Mingsuo, a farmer from the eastern province of Jiangsu,told China’s state broadcaster that he couldn’t sleepbecause he kept picturing his precious melons exploding inhis field like “landmines”.“On May 7, I came out and counted 80 (burstingwatermelons) but by the afternoon it was 100,” said Mr Liuwho told China Central TV that three acres of his melonshad exploded. “Two days later I didn’t bother to countanymore.”Agricultural experts said that the melons had been sprayedwith “forchlorfenuron” – a legal additive that is also used inthe United States – but that excessive quantities had beenused in wet conditions to try and boost profits by getting thefruit to market early. Farmers use the chemical to speed upgrowth by two weeks and increase the size of the watermelon by 20%.In theory China follows many internationally recognizedstandards for food safety but in practice these are frequentlyignored. About 20 farmers and 45 acres of watermelonaround the city of Danyang were affected, CCTV added.China’s government is increasingly nervous about foodsafety issues after a string of scandals that includemelamine-tainted milk, toxic beansprouts, steroid-laced pork and meat that ‘glows in thedark.The ruined crops were fed to fish and pigs.

PHOTO: The growth chemical was used during arainy period when the melons are most delicate. (APImages)MAP: Farmers near Danyang City, China, losta total of 115 acres of watermelons. (Jim McMahon)

As Chinese consumers have become more demanding of higher standards, thegovernment has had to look at the Chinese food supply chain.

Four minute video about the reasons for adopting a more modern approach to farming andfood production.China to push modern farming - Biz Wire - December 25,2013 - BONTV Chinahttp://www.bon.tv/Biz-Wire/

The Good News.

Food quality and safety is of paramount importance tothe Chinese Government both in terms of feeding itsown population as well as securely the image of itsexported food products. Progress is being made by anumber of different methods:-

a)The establishment

"Food is essential, and safety should be a top priority.Food safety is closely related to people's lives andhealth, economic development and social harmony.We must create a food safety system of self-disciplinedfood companies with integrity, effective governmentsupervision and broad public support to improveoverall food safety."

PremierLiKeqiangHead of the National Food Safety Commission, State Council, P.R.C

Zhu Yi, an associate professor from China Agricultural University, says the change willprovide legal basis for more effective supervision.

"Previously, if a tomato is sold on the vegetable market, it falls under the jurisdiction ofthe agricultural department. When it is sold in the supermarket, it is under the industryand commerce department. When the tomato is processed into tomato sauce, it fallsunder the supervision of the quality inspection department. When it is served in therestaurant, the food and drug administration will be responsible for supervision. Now,under the amendment, the food and drug administration will be responsible for allprocesses. It can help to plug loopholes in the supervision system."

On March 10 2013, the Chinese government announced it will create a newsuperministry to ensure the quality of China’s food and drugs. The General Food andDrug Administration will assumeresponsibility for setting standards and monitoringproduction, distribution, and consumption—tasks previously handled by as many asnine different government organizations. “The restructuring will better facilitate theenforcement of the food safety laws and regulations, and improve the safety of thenation’s food and drugs,” said Chen Xiaohong, a vice minister of health, the officialEnglish-language China Daily reported.China is home to an estimated 200 million families that farm, each cultivating anaverage plot of 1.5 acres, as well as a half-million food processing companies, mostwith fewer than 10 employees. The small scale of most agriculture and food processingmeans the owners have limited resources to invest in the advanced techniques thatcould ensure better quality. “One of the challenges here in China is just the sheervolume of what’s here,” says Christopher Hickey. He runs a 13-person branch in Chinaof the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has inspected products bound fortheU.S. since the office opened in late 2008.

A new and improved food safety law in 2014

June 2014 - A revision to China's Food Safety Law had its first reading on Monday andpledges tough sanctions for offenders, promising the strictest food safety supervisionsystem.

The current law has helped improve food safety, but penalties are comparatively lightand it does not deter offenders.

The latest case was use of illegal additives in growing bean sprouts, one of China'smost popular vegetables. Police in east China's Shandong Province seized nearly twotonnes of toxic bean sprouts last week.

The bill is considered a move to realize the promise the current leadership made at thethird plenary session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee in lastNovember, which is to establish the strictest ever supervision system on food safety.

Penalties will include compensation to consumers of three times loss due to healthproblems and financial loss as a result of substandard food.

Producers will face fines of up to 30 times the value of their products. Punishment oflandlords who are aware of illegal activities taking place on their property, and criminalproceedings against those involved in food safety scandals.

There will also be strict testing, internal inspections, restrictions on sourcing and reportsto regulators especially concerning those producing dairy products (mainly as a result ofthe Sanlu Group melamine in infant milk formula case in 2008).

b) The MNCs

Large International companies such as Nestlé have been involved in a number ofventures in the country. The company has opened a dairy training institute inHeilongjiang province and earlier this year a food safety training institute in Beijing.

Nestlé marks first phase of new dairy training institute in China

Jun 6, 2012

FUTURE DAIRY TRAINING CENTRE: The institute will helpfarmers source high quality milk sustainably.Nestlé is marking the beginning of the construction of its new dairy farming institute in Shuangcheng reaffirmingits role in the development of the Chinese milk industry.The company announced in January that the institute in Heilongjiang province aims to be China’s leading dairytraining centre, offering teaching courses from national and international experts.

The first construction phase is expected to be completed by the end of 2012.Five year project

The institute will be supported by three training farms providing practical guidance to help farmers scale up theirfacilities and improve their management skills.Farmers will be encouraged to use the latest agricultural technologyand source high quality milk sustainably.Nestlé, the local government, investors and farmers will work together tohelp create an investment fund of 2.5 billion Chinese Yuan Renminbi (over CHF 370 million) for the five yearproject.

Our first priority

“The emphasis will be on training farmers so that they are prepared to modernise their farms and deliver highquality milk in an efficient and responsible way,” said HeikoSchipper, Managing Director for the Food and BeverageDivision at Nestlé China.“Increasing the skills of farmers is our first priority,” he added.

“Nestlé has had a long partnership with China, from the start, our company has worked diligently to develop thelocal dairy industry."HeikoSchipper, Managing Director for the Food and Beverage Division at Nestlé China.Long-term partners

Nestlé has agreed to work with the Shuangcheng government to build on the training and technical assistancealready provided to local farmers.Initially, the institute aims to educate about 700 farmers a year to help them improve milk quality and raisehealthier cows.

Rural development

Nestlé built a dairy factory in Shuangcheng in 1987.Since then the company has continued to boost the dairy industry in the region. Last year it provided training andtechnical assistance to more than 7,000 farmers.The average dairy farm size has nearly doubled.“Nestlé has had a long partnership with China,” continued Mr Schipper. “From the start, our company has workeddiligently to develop the local dairy industry."“We look forward to continue sharing our experiences, resources, technology and facilities.”Creating Shared Value

Nestlé’s work with farmers in Shuangcheng is part of what it calls ‘Creating Shared Value’, an approach to businessthat aims to create value for the company’s shareholders at the same time as for those communities where itoperates.Farmers benefit from sourcing high quality milk and gaining training expertise.These efforts also boost the Shuangcheng region to drive its dairy industry and help Nestlé efficiently source highquality milk for its products.

Food safety focus as Nestlé opens China instituteMar 25, 2014

COLLABORATION: The institute will help meet China's growing demand for healthy, safefood.As part of efforts to strengthen Nestlé’s food safety research in China, the company hasopened a food safety research centre in Beijing.The Nestlé Food Safety Institute (NFSI) will work closely with authorities to helpprovide the scientific foundation for food safety policies and standards.The support will include early management of food safety issues and collaboration withlocal universities, research institutes and government agencies on food safety issues.It will also promote scientific communication and help run food safety training

programmes.

Imports

Asia drives Jersey milk demand

(BBC Newswebsite 14 April 2014)

Record quantities of Jersey milk are being shipped to China to satisfydemand from Chinese consumers worried about the safety of localproduce.

Farmers say the growth is an economic lifesaver as domestic consumption is too smallto support the industry.

Island-wide production is growing by 1m litres per year as the Jersey Dairy farmers' co-operative expands overseas.

The dairy has also hired 10 temporary workers to help meet demand.

Paul Houze, of Lodge Farm, owns 200 dairy cattle and is also a director of the dairy.

Million litresHe said: "We're being allowed as an island to produce an extra half a million litres lastyear and another half a million litres this coming year so production will have gone up bya million litres. The dairy's current intake is 13.5m litres so it's a sizeable increase.

"If we can generate profitable export sales that goes towards keeping the price of milklocally as low as we can."

Jersey's dairy farmers are protected from imports but must adhere to quotas decided byJersey Dairy, which last year raised wholesale prices by 3p per litre to £1.09.

UHT milk produced in Jersey is distributed to 180 Chinese stores where demand hasbeen three times higher than expected while butter made from Jersey milk is provingpopular in Japan, where it sells for £7 for 250g.

The dairy also supplies ice cream to shops, holiday camps and beach resorts all overthe UK.

Bob Jones, head of marketing and export, said: "The vast majority of our outputsupplies the local market, that's our priority, but for farms to continue to be viable andprofitable we have to produce more milk and look at markets outside the island."

d) Organic farming

Although very small in comparison to the total food supply in China,since 2012, theconsumption of organic food in China accounted for 1.01% of the whole consumption offood, up by 0.65% compared with 0.36% in 2007. It is predicted that the Chineseorganic market will reach 24.8 billion to 59.4 billion RMB in 2015. According to thegrowth momentum, the market share of organic food is going to reach 2% among theoverall food market.

The first organic potato enterprise was approved and certified in Heilongjiang. Nowthere are between 10 and 20 enterprises dealing with organic potato production anddistribution in Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia and Gansu. Among the organic potatoproducing counties, Wuchuan County is the biggest organic potato producer in China.(FAO 2008).

In March 2013 Sun Xu, a 2006 graduate, founded an organic agricultural cooperativewith his family in his hometown in Harbin, northeast China’s Heilongjiang province afterworking in other cities for a certain period. The agricultural cooperative specializes inresearch, production, supply and sale. It mainly produces ecological feed, ecologicalpork, farm and pasture products and green vegetables. Sun Xu hopes that his careerwould bring healthy green foods to more people.

e) New ideas from aquaculture to organics.

Hong Kong's fish farms in the skyBy Peter ShadboltHong Kong

Lloyd Moskalik sells two tonnes of fish to wholesalers each week

Under eerie blue lights designed to simulate the ocean depths, hundreds offish swim serenely through the bubbling waters of their circular tanks, 15floors up in the sky.

There are 11 plastic tanks in total, holding a combined 80,000 litres of salt water.

They are full of grouper, a white-fleshed fish, which are all destined to end up onthe plates of restaurant-goers across Hong Kong.

This is the scene at Oceanethix, one of the numerous so-called "vertical fishfarms" in the special administrative region, which have become a key fixture of itssupply chain.

If you like, this is rooftop farming on steroids”

Lloyd MoskalikOceanethixFor while most fish farms around the world are at sea, or at least, land level, inHong Kong it is more often a necessity to put them many floors up in tallbuildings.

This is because as one of the most densely populated places in the world, thereis simply very little spare space. So fish farms have to fit in where they can.

For the small firms that dominate the industry, it is worth the effort, as Hong Konghas an insatiable appetite for fish and seafood. It consumes more than 70kg (11stone) per capita every year, 10 times more than in the US.

"We're way above the hustle and bustle," jokes Lloyd Moskalik, managingdirector of Oceanethix, which is based in Hong Kong's New Territories. "If youlike, this is rooftop farming on steroids."

People in Hong Kong are big fish eatersHis business, which employs six people in Hong Kong, buys in the groupers asbaby fish, or fingerlings. They then take between 10 and 13 months to get up tomarket weight.

If you come here on a Saturday it's an absolute theme park - there are peoplerunning everywhere”

OsbertLamOwner, City FarmOceanethix sells about two tonnes of groupers to fish wholesalers each week,and Mr Moskalik says he can get as much as 776 Hong Kong dollars ($100; £60)per kilogram.

As demand for farmed fish has soared in the region, wholesale prices have risenat a rate of between 10% and 15% per annum for the past five years.

Oceanethix also sells its water-recycling systems to other companies across Asiasetting up similar fish farms in the sky.

"We've been selected by the Korean government as part of an ambitious plan toestablish vertical farms in multi-story buildings... in Seoul," says Mr Moskalik.

The Singapore government has also bought a country licence for Oceanethix'swater-recycling systems, and the company has its own sister facility in Shanghai.

Farm waiting listsBut it is not just fish farms that have been taking to the skies in Hong Kong, as agrowing number of organic fruit and vegetable plots are being created on top ofskyscrapers and other spare rooftop spaces.

There is a waiting list for space at Osbert Lam's rooftop farmsNo doubt in part caused by a string of recent food safety scandals in mainlandChina, from where Hong Kong sources most of its food, a growing number ofHongkongers are wishing to grow their own produce as naturally as possible.

Helping to meet this demand is Osbert Lam, the owner of Hong Kong City Farms.

From just a hobby 10 years ago, he now runs three farms that convert thousandsof square feet of rooftop space into organic plots he rents at about 190 HongKong dollars per month.

"We've got a list of about 30 people all waiting to get boxes," he says, from thetop of a 14-storey industrial estate building in Quarry Bay, in the heart of one ofHong Kong's business districts.

Michael Leung's honey commands a premium price"If you come here on a Saturday it's an absolute theme park - there are peoplerunning everywhere."

He says the urban farms reveal just how shallow Hong Kong's urban roots are.

"Many of the people that come here are not even two or three generations awayfrom the land," says Mr Lam.

"In many cases, it's just one generation before they were from farming families. Alot of people come here with a lot of knowledge."

Expensive honeyThe growth of rooftop gardens has also meant more business for Hong Kong'surban beekeepers.

Michael Leung, founder of HK Honey, is always on the look out for new places toput his hives, and to help him locate them, he looks up for papaya trees.

Green spaces are limited in central parts of Hong Kong"The papaya tree grows very well in Hong Kong - most people, if they growanything on the roof, it's a papaya," he says. "The height of the tree allows youfrom ground level to see that someone is using the rooftop.

"We're always looking for little trees that stick out. They're like a flag, a modernagricultural flag," he says. "Through that, we then try to approach the peoplegrowing on the roof."

Mr Leung then arranges to rent space for his hives.

He says that the honey his bees produce has a spicy tang, which reflects thebiodiversity of Hong Kong's urban flora, and particularly the Chinese basil manypeople like to grow.

Such is the quality of Mr Leung's honey that he is able to sell it for a whopping240 Hong Kong dollars per jar.

Pressure on landFor Hong Kong's larger commercial organic farming operations, which buyproduce from Hong Kong's dwindling slivers of agricultural land near the borderwith China, the continuous pressure on agricultural land from developers couldmean that rooftop farms will one day be all that's left to the special administrationregion, which even now produces 2% of the food it consumes.

Hong Kong has a proud restaurant sceneTodd Darling, of Homegrown Foods, an organic grocery delivery business inHong Kong, said permissive zoning regulations make it more cost effective forowners of agricultural land to store shipping containers on the space than to farmit.

In the meantime, however, the food scandals that creep across the border frommainland China have, perversely, been good for his organic business.

"I would never like to say that, but it does tend to encourage people to consideralternatives," he says.

However…………………….

Despite the efforts, concerns are growing among ordinary Chinese. A survey by thePew Research Center released last year showed that 41 percent of Chinese believefood safety is a very big problem, up from 12 percent four years earlier, a largerincrease than for any other major worry, including corruption and air pollution. Bloggerswrite regularly about the latest food scandal, and a popular free iPhone app calledChina Survival Guide has detailed daily food and drug safety problems since last year.

Additional reading and source material

Growing pains of China's agricultural water needsBy Mark Kinver

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27978124

Robot chefs take over Chinese restaurant

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-27107248

Food safety in China: A mapping of problems, governance and research. FORHEAD /SSRC Feb 2014

Organic Farming in China: Chengdu’s AnlongVillagehttp://sustainablecitiescollective.com/chinaurbandevelopmentblog/42599/organic-farming-china-chengdu-s-anlong-village

AGRICULTURE IN CHINA: CHALLENGES, SHORTAGES, IMPORTS AND ORGANICFARMINGhttp://factsanddetails.com/china/cat9/sub63/item348.html

Links to areas of the curriculum

This information could be used in any topic area covering population and food supplies, foodsecurity and sustainability issues, as well as any regional case study. Examples where it may befound in specifications include:-WJEC GCE G3a – Theme 6 Emerging Asia China and G4 Sustainability Theme 1 Sustainablefood supply. Also of use for Theme 4 Development and Theme 5 Globalisation.WJEC GCSE Spec A Core Theme 5 InterdependenceEdexcel GCE Unit 3 Contested Planet Superpower geographies

Nicola Hawley July 2014