Food hygiene rules promise to safeguard health,but implementation is proving difficult.

For many local residents, food stalls like the one pictured here are a cheap alternative to dining at restaurants.

"Every time I come to Shanghai, I will bring a lot of vegetables and pork to my son's home in Yangpu District, because I find the vegetables sold in the neighbouring market are grown in the greenhouse and have been given a lot of chemicals"A farmer

THE director of the Shanghai Agricultural Product Central Batch-Sell Market in Pudong says that buyers can ask for a receipt at every free market. The document will indicate the name of the agricultural product bought, its unit price, its weight, and the number of the vendor's booth in the market. "This means that every peddler is responsible for the agricultural product he sells," says He Guodong.

But in the past, no one was responsible for a case of food poisoning, because the authority concerned could not trace the source. Gu Zhenhua, head of the Institute of Public Health Supervision, said: "In a case of food poisoning, say in a factory canteen, scores of workers have symptoms, so we can only give penalties to the canteen, but the canteen may also be a victim instead of a troublemaker. With this receipt, we can immediately find where the produce comes from."

Regulations

This source-tracing method is only part of the food-safety regulations (formally called Temporary Regulations for Supervision of Edible Agricultural Products) set up by the Shanghai Municipal Government last July.

"It is a breakthrough for the existing Food Safety Law, which was established in 1995," said Gu.

"As it introduces the credibility principle into the production and marketing of agricultural products, every seller is responsible for his buyer and if a seller breaks this honesty principle, he will be punished by the authority concerned.

"But in the past, we could do nothing about this, as we could not find the real troublemaker."

This is the city's first regulation focusing on controlling the quality of six categories of agricultural products: vegetables, fruit, milk, domestic animals and fowl, grain and oil, and aquatic products.

The city will step up agriculture-related inspections and impose fines on those who violate the new rules, which aim to ensure contaminant-free food through the entire production cycle, from farming to sales.

The city consumes 40-to-60 billion tons of agricultural products annually, according to statistics from the Shanghai Municipal Agricultural Commission. Among them, only 20 billion tons are locally produced. How to control the quality of such large amounts of food has been a headache for the municipal government.

"It is a very tough task to control the individual farmers," said Wang Guilong, vice-director of the Shanghai Fengxian Agricultural Commission.

"Actually local people are not willing to grow vegetables, and they lend their fields to farmers from other provinces such as Jiangsu and Anhui. The migrant farmers sometimes do not conform to the regulations and use too many chemicals and additives."

Farmers' ruse

Chen Anmei, a former farmer in Anhui Province, said it is common practice in her hometown for a vegetable farmer to reserve clean land for himself.

"In this land, we plant vegetables for our own food, and we do not use chemical fertilizers or hormones. But for the vegetables to be sold, we use many chemicals to kill insects and make them look more appealing."

But Cui Han, a farmer from Jiangsu Province, complained of the bad taste of vegetables and meat in Shanghai.

"Every time I come to Shanghai, I will bring a lot of vegetables and pork to my son's home in Yangpu District, because I find the vegetables sold in the neighbouring market are grown in the greenhouse and have been given a lot of chemicals."Shanghainese live with the reality. Most Shanghai housewives immerse green vegetables in clean water for at least half an hour before cooking. "Shanghainese have become experts in food safety," said Chen Weisong, senior medical representative with the Abbott Company in Shanghai. "But the expertise is based on food-poisoning accidents."

One insider unwilling to be identified said he seldom ate pork after he visited several pig-raising farms in the countryside.

"Almost every pig takes lean meat essence (shouroujing), an additive that helps farmers produce leaner pigs," he said. "The authority concerned usually takes strict urine tests in testing the Shouroujing, but sometimes in vain. As a pig raiser can stop using the additive 40 days before the test, which is usually taken before the butchering, in most cases, it cannot be tested out."

"It is hard to test out lean meat essence, with limited time and equipment," said He Guodong. "Therefore, the best way to avoid taking shouroujing by accident is not to eat the internal parts of a pig, especially its liver, where the poisoning additive accumulates."

Long-term effects

In addition to supervising the individual lucrative farmers or merchants of farming products, another difficulty is how to make the chemical-filled land clean.

"Some chemical fertilizers have existed in soil for decades, so even if farmers stop using them, the chemical residues can still enter the crops and do harm to the body," said Yan Chengzhao, director with the Shanghai Institute of Industrial Microbiology.

"So food safety is a whole environmental project instead of the matter of some individuals."

"Suppose the whole environment was polluted, where could we get the hygienic food?" said Wang Jinglan, a retired teacher. "If the water and air are seriously polluted, we would kill ourselves even if we did not eat anything."

How to test the safety of the agricultural products quickly is another difficulty of food safety control.

Take as an example the Shanghai Agricultural Product Central Batch-sell Market. Every day, a total of 600 tons of vegetables are transacted there, but only a small part are tested.

"We are short of quality inspectors as well money to buy advanced equipment," said He Guodong.

"As to the pork, we transact 2000 pigs per day. We can only do sample testing, in most cases with the naked eyes only."