The Chinese government is struggling to improve the quality of agricultural products amid a number of scandals involving pesticide residues exceeding the maximum limit found in food items.
In an effort to provide safe farm products, the government has been designating organic food production areas nationwide to promote cultivation of what they call “Green Food,” products made with less or no use of agricultural chemicals.
In China, it is common for consumers to immerse vegetables in water for a couple of hours after they purchase them. Some people even put vegetables in salt water for tens of minutes in order to reduce the health risk of pesticide residues as much as possible. Various detergents designed to remove pesticides from vegetables are sold in the country.
Consumers have become nervous because of numerous cases of pesticide residues exceeding the limit found in food products. The China Food and Drug Administration announced in May 10 that out of some 200,000 food products checked between January and April, pesticide residues exceeding the limit were found in some 390 items, or 0.2 percent of the total. The items were taken off from store shelves.
The problem of pesticide residues remains one of the most pressing concerns among the Chinese people. A search on Baidu, the nation’s largest search engine, on the term “pesticide residue” showed some 14.3 million results.
Following an incident in 2008 in which milk powder was found contaminated with toxic melamine leading to deaths of infants, the Chinese government revised the Food Safety Law in 2009 to strengthen inspection on pesticide residues. However, the move failed to solve the root of the problem, as many farms continued to rely on the conventional farming method of using pesticides for the sake of efficiency and immediate profits.
To tackle the situation, the government began establishing production centers for organic farming in 2010 to cultivate Green Food. The government has designated 283 eco-labelled food production areas in 31 provinces and municipalities nationwide by the end of last year.
The government-run China Green Food Development Center (CGFDC) oversees two Green Food standards: A, which allows some use of designated chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and AA, which allows no use of such chemicals like Japan’s organic food products.
Green Food production amounted to a record high of 56.13 million tons last year, up 16 percent from a year before, occupying some 10 percent of total food production. Out of that, organic food, produced without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides, totaled 1.38 million tons, up 14 percent from the previous year.
The CGFDC officials say that although organic food products are definitely safe, they are still not so common among Chinese consumers because they are high-priced. The Chinese government needs to make it a policy to promote organic food and at the same time develop biotic pesticides that are friendly to both humans and the environment, they said.