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Beef up meat safety

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-20 07:41

The campaign to ensure food safety is a tough and prolonged one.

The months-long battle over tainted milk, which exhausted the nation and devastated the dairy industry, was by no means the end of the fight.

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Instead it marked the beginning of an all-out war on tainted food.

Recent worrying reports of waterlogged meat in Shanghai, the result of small slaughterhouses injecting water and even chemicals into pork to add mass, means we still can't afford to rest.

Since pork and beef make up two thirds of the meat consumed by the Chinese, contamination is a major issue.

Although the Zhejiang province beef injected with water tipped the scales at just five kilograms when it was found in the Shanghai market, local journalists found the dodgy practice to be rather common in some small private slaughterhouses.

A recent edition of the Southern Weekend also reported that pork had been injected with water in the Guangzhou region in the past few years after the local government allowed farmers to freely choose slaughterhouses, instead of the three regulated venues.

Waterlogged pork was also found in Tianjin in January.

Feng Ping, chief engineer at China Meat Research Center, fielded reports of waterlogged pork in 48 slaughterhouses in suburbs near a northeast city.

Feng, also a deputy to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, claimed injecting pork with water had been practiced for quite some time.

The findings are the most apalling food safety alarm since the Sanlu melamine milk scandal late last year.

It calls for immediate and effective official action.

It is true that governments at various levels have sharpened their focus on food safety in the past few years. In both Shanghai and Jiashan, the governments have beefed up the inspection of slaughterhouses and meat markets in the past week.

But inspection would surely become more effective if different government departments were more coordinated, instead of the respective divisions in charge of livestock farming, slaughtering to marketing, acting individually.

In many parts of the country, government departments charged with enforcing food safety laws are seriously understaffed.

At the moment, designating a small number of slaughterhouses for the job still seems to be an effective way to control the quality of the process and the quality of the meat.

Like those perpetrators in the Sanlu milk scandal, those responsible for tainted meat cases should be punished severely to show zero tolerance on food safety violations.