Donkey meat, fox meat,
you pick one.
You may pick neither.
But for a lot of Chinese foodies, donkey meat is a delicacy. Fox meat? No way.
But according to the BBC, a recent recall of a favorite snack “5-spice donkey meat” at Wal-Mart
stores in China is bad news for the Wal-Mart customers: the supposedly delicate
and yummy donkey meat was found to contain traces of fox DNA.
So how was fox DNA
tested in the donkey meat? Wal-Mart says that it voluntarily tests food samples
“beyond what is legally required in China.” The increased safety measures have
been taken after Wal-Mart was troubled with contamination and mislabeling
incidents, including a selling sesame oil and squid with hazardous levels of
chemicals in 2012, and mislabeling
of regular pork as organic in 2011.
Food safety has become a
very serious issue in China. Wikipedia explains that In 2008, infant formula tainted with melamine had
sickened an estimated 300,000 people, including 54,000 hospitalized babies. China
surely has food regulations, but they are complex and somewhat ambiguous. Although
the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) is presumably the state agency that oversees and enforces the food polices, there are many other agencies having overlapped
duties and functionalities as SFDA. Effectually no single agency is responsible
for all food safety regulations and enforcement. The inefficient enforcement of
food law can also be attributed to the dilution of responsibilities under China’s
multilevel government structure (state, provinces, and counties), implicit
regulation-free industry policies, and legal underdeveloped system.
The latest update on the incident: Wal-Mart is reportedly used unlicensed suppliers of the donkey
meat in Shandong province of China. Wal-Mart’s finger-pointing may not
effectively relieve it of liability, though. The inspection process, such as to ensure
that vendors have all necessary permits including government inspection reports
and business licenses, has to be established before a product goes on sale. Wal-Mart
uses “special approvals” in China with suppliers it already does business with.
Unfortunately, the approval process for suppliers is either governed by a
relatively low standard, or no checks of suppliers have ever been involved in
the approval process.
This post was prepared by William Mitchell College of Law student Dan Li.
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