Farmers in several Chinese provinces sold rotten fruit to distributors, which was then bought by canned fruit producers and juice manufacturers to cut costs, the 21st Century Business Herald said in the report on Monday.
Chinese food-safety officials have ordered two fruit juice companies to suspend operations and help with an investigation into reports that they used rotten or unripe fruit in their products.
Chinese food-safety officials have ordered two fruit juice companies to suspend operations and help with an investigation into reports that they used rotten or unripe fruit in their products.
“We take this very seriously and have urgently deployed food safety teams in Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces to immediately open an investigation,” the China Food and Drug Administration said on their website.
To deal with food security, China has expanded a pilot system that tracks the movement of meat and vegetables to the supermarket shelf. Since You have several million farmers with thousands of traders that sell to a host of wholesale markets, and then distribute to a range of processors, supermarkets, and markets throughout the country traceability is near impossible.
Some have suggested, then just get rid of small farmers, and make them operate in larger production units. But many of these small farmers depend on their land to survive. As a result, The government experimented with integrating farmers in industrial production chains. However, pushing everyone in the direction of industrialised agriculture without a strong regulatory framework to monitor food safety creates huge risks.
That is exactly what happened in the dairy sector, and led to the melamine crisis of 2008. Small farmers were vertically integrated into large dairy companies that did not have the capacity to provide sufficient oversight,
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