In a massive crackdown on food safety problems, Chinese authorities say they have arrested more than 2,000 people and closed 5,000 businesses over the last four months.
China’s Food Safety Commission said the arrests stem from inspections since April of nearly six million food manufacturers by some 3.5 million officers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited a report from the state-run Xinhua news agency.
The arrests and shutdowns are the latest in a series of sometimes fierce crackdowns in China over food safety scandals.
The former head of the State Food and Drug Administration was executed inn 2007 for taking bribes, and several people blamed for a 2008 milk contamination that killed at least six children and sickened 300,000 others received severe sentences. That incident prompted the government to promise tighter food oversight and to create the Food Safety Commission.
And just last month, a court in central China’s Henan province sentenced a man to death for producing and dealing clenbuterol, which speeds muscle growth in pigs but is believed responsible for sickening hundreds of people.
In the recent crackdown, authorities investigated 1,200 criminal cases in which foods were illegally tainted with chemicals not meant for human consumption, Xinhua reported. Authorities also destroyed processing facilities where the chemicals were produced and stored.
Experts say oversight of the Chinese food industry is hampered by its decentralization. China has some 200 million farming households and 400,000 small food-processors, according to Christopher Hickey, the China director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The government has said it wants to consolidate farming with food manufacturing, but progress has been hindered, in part, by the need to balance that goal against the risk of leaving hundreds of millions of rural residents unemployed.
Enforcement is also spotty, according to Wu Ming, a professor of public health at Peking University, who told the Journal that food safety crackdowns are often followed by long periods of little or no enforcement.
Soaring inflation, now at a three-year high, has further aggravated the problem by putting financial pressure on food producers in the form of high oil prices and labor costs, said Sang Liwei, a Beijing director at the nonprofit organization Global Food Safety Forum. “When they add chemicals to food, they’re looking to make meat leaner or vegetables bigger so can make more money,” Sang said.
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