Halal Meat Products Enter the OFS (State Council Food Safety Committee) Meat Regulation List

Recently, the safety of meat and meat products has once again caused controversy in China. Last year, a group of diseased pig carcasses drifted into a river near Shanghai, raising concerns about the spread of foodborne diseases in the black market. Recently, meat suppliers in China have engaged in various unsanitary practices, including adulterating their products with expired meat.

In this latest wave, the State Council's Office of Food Safety (OFS) is stepping up regulation of the production and sale of meat and meat products. The OFS, affiliated with China's State Council Food Safety Committee, is China's most powerful leadership in this area; including its premier, its members set high-level food safety policy.

In a notice issued earlier this month, the OFS required the government to focus on supervising the safety of meat (including meat products). The notice aims to address problems of meat in hot weather, high heat, or improper storage, as well as counterfeit meat. It requires provincial OFS offices to strictly enforce these related issues.

Specifically, the notice requires local provincial OFS offices to organize local agencies to conduct targeted inspections of companies producing meat products, wholesale markets, fairs, supermarkets, specialty meat shops, and food-service establishments. The main departments cooperating in this area are the China Food and Drug Administration and the State Ethnic Affairs Commission.

The local OFS and these agencies will look for establishments that do not follow proper practice, as well as the review systems in place at each establishment for testing incoming products, production control, finished-product inspection and storage conditions. Products must have documents and stamps to prove they have been inspected and tested according to China's Animal Disease Prevention Law, and that they have undergone corresponding quality testing.

The OFS also instructed all localities to focus on regulating the production of Halal meat. Halal meat - which China is increasingly exporting to the Middle East - has recently been at the center of adulteration problems. Local OFS offices should increase scrutiny of Halal meat production licenses and carefully guide labeling rules. The OFS must direct specific resources to inspect the relevant slaughterhouses, distributors and food-service establishments.

He also noted the overall requirement to set up a better system to handle citizens' complaints about substandard meat and to track products.

Local OFS offices need to establish a complaint hotline and a whistleblower reward system. China has used this system to handle complaints from citizens for several years, supporting monetary rewards for suggestions on raising food safety issues.

Moreover, the penalties for non-compliance are severe. There is full guidance on enforcing the relevant laws to punish violators. In the latest draft food safety law, which China's legislature published to solicit public comment, fines of up to about USD 30,000 are imposed for distributing diseased or contaminated meat. The announcement mentions, and the food safety law strengthens, penalties that also include criminal prosecution. The government has increasingly shown determination and a commitment to prosecuting violators of criminal food-safety standards.

Now all of this may sound promising. But it may also sound rather familiar. China has taken crackdowns and strict measures before, but its food safety still suffers repeated lapses. Along with the explanation accompanying the latest draft food safety law, it now promises "strict" punishment of violators. But the government may have to invest more resources to help enterprises comply with basic regulations and to take seriously the gravity of this problem, which keeps recurring with troubling regularity. Of course, more is needed before we can say the reforms have succeeded.