Horsemeat scandal also a lesson for China

In ancient Chinese literature, there was a story about "hanging a cow's head but selling horsemeat." Now, that story has become a reality in Europe.

Although the EU has the strictest supervision system for food safety, horses easily "galloped" into the supervision vacuum. China must learn from the scandal.

Two systems newly set up by China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine have drawn attention.

The chief quality officer (CQO) system in large and medium-sized enterprises was established recently. We hope the innovation will yield results, rather than make a superficial change.

This system can, to some extent, help the government regain the public's trust. In addition to this benefit, related food enterprises can not only improve their reputations, but also strengthen customer loyalty.

Whether quality supervisors in enterprises do their work properly is more important. The CQO system concentrates enterprises' self-regulation on individuals, but the business entity and CQO should still be the first people to take responsibility once food safety incidents occur.

Of course, the public should not expect too much from the system, as micro enterprises and individual workshops still account for about 90 percent of China's food industry.

Even though the public tends to follow the media and focus on famous large enterprises, the most challenging aspect of China's food safety supervision lies with this 90 percent.

The EU defined the horsemeat scandal as label fraud. Before this year's Spring Festival, incidents of pork becoming beef and duck meat turning into mutton in China attracted a lot of attention. However, domestic media paid more attention to beef extracts, and even stigmatized savory flavors.

As a result, the focus was shifted from fraudulent commercial activities to food safety issues, with eye-catching words like "carcinogenic," and the nature of the frauds was ignored.

From the horsemeat scandal, we can see that despite the fact that the EU has a perfect traceability system, it still cannot control and confirm every source.

Safe food does not come from strict standards, or laws and regulations. It can be produced only if operators are responsible and come under strict management.

Moving on to another upcoming system: the system of actively reporting product quality status. In a time when people want to maximize profits with minimum effort in the shortest time, it would be great if food enterprises, which are one of the industries with the slimmest profits, could make profits while seeking a balance between long-term and immediate interests through full use of the system and credit management.

In 2011, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology launched a national food industry enterprise credit information public service platform in order to make public the actions, good and bad, of national food enterprises.

Overall, passive release of information has resulted in a low social impact. Apart from compulsory measures, operational instructions and incentive mechanisms are also needed to help the system take effect.

The author is an associate professor at College of Food Science & Nutritional Engineering, China Agricultural University.