Food Safety Issues In China:Causes And Policy Suggestions

The primary purpose of this study is to determine the most prominent barriers to providing safe food in China today and also to provide policy suggestions to overcome those barriers.Since the reform and opening up period,the food industry has become more liberalized and demand increased dramatically,but with this development the number of food safety scandals has also increased at an unprecedented rate.China's food safety issues pose a significant problem to the central government,as the public loses trust in the government's ability to regulate the industry and ensure safe production and handling of food products.This paper identifies three major barriers to food safety in China-fragmented regulatory regime,small scale producers that dominate the market and profit-seeking activities that drive production of unsafe and even poisonous food.Through identifying these barriers and examining the food safety cases,as well as through interviews with industry experts,this paper determines that profit seeking incentives are at the core of the food safety problem in China,as bureaucrats and small businesses exploit the lack of stringent regulation to increase their profits by illegal means that harm consumers.In terms of policy suggestions to alleviate this problem,this paper suggests a bigger involvement of private businesses to improve their production techniques,introduction of traceability systems to increase trust in society,establishment of a single regulatory body and introduction of a third party entity to monitor and test production sites to ensure compliance.