A Research On Governance Dilemma Of Food Safety In Our Country

The current situation of food safety issues in our country is not optimistic. Numerous foodsafety incidents are known to the public, such as the lean meat powder case, use of Sudan RedDye and Illicit cooking oil, Sanlu milk scandal and etc. dating back several years ago, and therecycled moon cake fillings, Sulfur Wolfberries incidents, Lamb Meat Scandal, making ricenoodles with dirty water and etc. of the latest few years. The growing unrest over food safety hasposed a hazard on human health, continually challenging the public on the acceptable bottom line.On the surface, the common phenomenon related with moral decay, responsibility deficiencies,regulation failure and confidence collapse in the food industry is a legal issue caused by legalflaws, lax enforcement and weak supervision, which should be addressed through legal means.But with further analysis, it is also a systematic social security issue, which is a manifestation ofsocial disorder. For such a systematic risk matter, we may alleviate it in the short-term with thestrengthening of regulation measures and harsh punishments. However, in order to solve this issuefundamentally and to make people eat safely, securely and assuredly, we need to establish along-term food safety mechanism and optimize the whole food safety governance structure.The research object of this paper is the illicit cooking oil problems. The first documentedcase of using this illicit cooking oil was reported in the1990s, and was closely related to our livesthereafter. It is a typical food safety incident in China, which scatters all over the country, lastsnearly20years, possesses concealment feature and potentially threats public health. This articlediscusses the illicit cooking oil governance issues from the perspective of "the state, market, andsociety", revealing the structural imbalances among the three parties and interpreting the plightthat our government is facing in the process of addressing food safety issues. The article alsosuggests that to get rid of this food safety governance plight, we need to break the conventionalthinking way, namely, passively waiting for the government authorities to solve the problem for us.More importantly, we also need to improve the food safety governance through the role of thesociety, which means letting the government, market and the society jointly achieve a positiverelationship through benign interactions and the checks and balances between each other. Thisrelationship could provide structural support for all kinds of system operations, having a long-termpositive effect on the construction of food industry governance structure and making food safetymanagement exhibit its social initiatives.