Food production and food safety in China
Background
Food safety is a quite hot topic and important public health issue all over the world. Food-borne disease can cause serious harm. Millions of people suffered from diseases and even died because of having unsafe food.
Food supply and food safety carry major effects on China, as a country with large amount of population and serious pollution caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization. After the policy of Chinese economic reform in 1978, the country went through a rapid economic and technology growth, as well as booming in population. Because of that, most families now have the ability to get adequate food from market or producing food by themselves (Zhao & Kent, 2004). However on the other side, lots of food safety cases are exposed under this background from the beginning of 21 century. For example, Sudan I red was reported being used in chili sauce and eggs in 2005, baby formula contaminated by melamine, which leaded to 6 babies’ death in 2008, gutter oil found being reused in food in 2010, etc (Food safety incidents in China, 2014).
Therefore, the attention has been drawn from quantity of food to quality and safety. A gap between food demand and safe food supply becomes an urgent issue to be solved, which also affects global food market and food security.
Overview of food quantity and quality in the past
Overall, Chinese food industry has kept a steady and speed increase with the benefit of consequent economic growth. However in the middle of 19 century, there was a 3 years famine, which led to estimated tens of millions of people’s starving to death (Peng, 1987). Although there is no adequate data of the famine, the national mortality rate can explain the situa...
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American society has grown so accustomed to receiving their food right away and in large quantities. Only in the past few decades has factory farming come into existence that has made consuming food a non guilt-free action. What originally was a hamburger with slaughtered cow meat is now slaughtered cow meat that’s filled with harmful chemicals. Not only that, the corn that that cow was fed with is also filled with chemicals to make them grow at a faster rate to get that hamburger on a dinner plate as quickly as possible. Bryan Walsh, a staff writer for Time Magazine specializing in environmental issues discusses in his article “America’s Food Crisis” how our food is not only bad for us but dangerous as well. The word dangerous could apply to many different things though. Our food is dangerous to the consumer, the workers and farmers, the animals and the environment. Walsh gives examples of each of these in his article that leads back to the main point of how dangerous the food we are consuming every day really is. He goes into detail on each of them but focuses his information on the consumer.
The book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food, by Wayne Roberts introduces us to the concept of “food system”, which has been neglected by many people in today’s fast-changing and fast-developing global food scene. Roberts points out that rather than food system, more people tend to recognize food as a problem or an opportunity. And he believes that instead of considering food as a “problem”, we should think first and foremost about food as an “opportunity”.
With the help of different dietary assessment methods such as food recalls and food record,...
The remarkable advances in agriculture, medicine, and technology have led to the unprecedented growth in global population over the past 100 years. None of these advances occurred in a vacuum, but evolved within the broad public policy framework in which governments set policies in the area of health, education, and general welfare of its population, imposing strict safety standards (regulations) consistent with best practices. Since food is a primary necessity of life, worldwide governments have a substantial influence on the supply of foods offered for human consumption.
And, because food now comes at a low cost, it has become cheaper in quality and therefore potentially dangerous to the consumer’s health. These problems surrounding the ethics and the procedures of the instantaneous food system are left unchanged due to the obliviousness of the consumers and the dollar signs in the eyes of the government and big business. The problem begins with the mistreatment and exploitation of farmers. Farmers are essentially the backbone of the entire food system. Large-scale family farms account for 10% of all farms, but 75% of overall food production (CSS statistics).
There are many problems confronting our global food system. One of them is that the food is not distributed fairly or evenly in the world. According “The Last Bite Is The World’s Food System Collapsing?” by Bee Wilson, “we are producing more food—more grain, more meat, more fruits and vegetables—than ever before, more cheaply than ever before” (Wilson, 2008). Here we are, producing more and more affordable food. However, the World Bank recently announced that thirty-three countries are still famine and hungers as the food price are climbing. Wilson stated, “despite the current food crisis, last year’s worldwide grain harvest was colossal, five per cent above the previous year’s” (Wilson, 2008). This statement support that the food is not distributed evenly. The food production actually increased but people are still in hunger and malnutrition. If the food were evenly distributed, this famine problem would’ve been not a problem. Wilson added, “the food economy has created a system in w...
Many Americans believe their food supply is the safest in the world. This has been questioned recently by extensive outbreaks of illnesses caused by foods. The Centers for Disease Control and prevention estimated that 48 million people came in contact with foodborne diseases each year (Schneider, M.J. 2017, pg 381). Many government agencies including local, state, and federal agencies, are responsible for and regulates food safety. The United States Department of Agriculture and the Food Administration share similar responsibilities for ensuring that foods are safe. The USDA is known to be responsible for the safety of meat and poultry safety while the Food and Drug Administration is known to be responsible for other foods, including fish, seafood, produce, etc. The Federal Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act were both passed in 1906. These two laws established a program to supervise and control manufacturing, labeling, sale of food and sale of drugs
The issues concerning the safety of human and animal food during transportation to and within the United States are concerns, which are raising the attention of both the American public and the United States Food and Drug Administration. A few of the main worries include, the improper handling of food products, the lack of proper control of the temperature in which the foods are kept, the concerns of cross-contamination, the lack of proper equipment for the loading of food products before they are transported to other area on the country and the lack of security.
...asmine Motarjemi. N.p.: Elsevier, 2014. 466-70. Vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of Food Safety. 4 vols. Science Direct. Web. 6 May 2014.
Food safety is an increasingly important public health issue. Governments all over the world are intensifying their efforts to improve food safety. Food borne illnesses are diseases, usually either infectious or toxic in nature, caused by agents that enter the body through the ingestion of food. “In industrialized countries, the percentage of people suffering from food borne diseases each year has been reported to be up to 30%. In the United States of America, for example, around 76 million cases of food borne diseases, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, are estimated to occur each year.” (Geneva 2)
Food is a basic requirement for life but unsafe food is slow poison. Thus safe food is not a luxury but a natural wish. Food safety is an important part of human right to food. Be it unsafe food served as mid-day or unsafe food sold in market they violate a very basic human right. Food safety according to World Health Organisation (WHO) is the assurance that food will not cause harm to the consumer and covers contamination by chemical and biological agents and concerns about inherent food nature. The aim of this paper is to discuss constitutional perspective of right to food safety. The word food safety finds nowhere mention in the Constitution of India. However Entry 18 in List III of the Constitution empowers both Parliament and the State legislature to enact law on food adulteration. And in this regard various laws have been made. Every citizen has fundamental right to safe food as Article 21 guarantees right to life while Article 47 cast a duty upon State to raise level of nutrition and public health. Food safety and standard is an important condition for enjoyment of right to life and public health.
Effective IT system would reduce the duplication of effort between it and other food safety agencies. There is a need for it to continue updating it hardware by removing the obsolete ones (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2010). There is a need for the U.S Congress to increase the FDA mandate to recall products that pose threat to public health directly without going through the court process. Strengthening FDA by giving direct recall or detection may help the agency prevent contaminated foods from reaching the shelf of retail stores and causing significant food-related illness. It would reduce the time the agency requires to verify, detect and detain misbranded and adulterated foods heading to the retail market. the law should allow the FDA to inspect more than 2% of the consumer goods imported from other countries because the majority of the foods particularly seas foods fall under FDA jurisdiction (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) et al., 2010). The lack of proper records and registration by farms reduced the capacity of FDA to trace the safety of foods going to retail stores from on-farms. The methods used by most of the food protection are outdated and cannot be used to detect and curb the current microbial pathogens that cause food poisoning. Thus,
The third weakness is the fact that food tests, inspections, and the detection of contaminants are taken seriously only after an outbreak of some food-borne diseases, food poisoning, or deaths. The increase in the number of food establishments or outlets such as cold stores, hypermarkets, and supermarkets reported by the Public Health Director has also made inspection and control mo...
In the absence of such confidence in food safety controls and regulatory systems, the safety and quality of food become the most important aspects associated with fish. In China, safety and quality rather than price were considered the most important factors influencing the consumption of fish products (Zhang, 2002). Consequently, consumers were willing to pay a modest price premium for food products that underwent more-rigorous food-safety inspection (Wang et al., 2009).
The growing world population is demanding more and different kinds of food. Rapid economic growth in many developing countries has pushed up consumers' purchasing power, generated rising demand for food, and shifted food demand away from traditional staples and toward higher-value foods like meat and milk.