Guo Jingbo: Unified standards are needed for aquatic product packaging

"You should go to the supermarket and look at frozen shrimp; half is shrimp and half is water." Ms. Xu called the news hotline to report this. The reporter then went to Century Lianhua Supermarket and bought a bag of shrimp for a test. The frozen shrimp labeled 211.5 grams weighed only 58 grams after thawing (October 12, Modern Jinqbao).

Tricking with aquatic product "packaging" is no longer news in the industry. A few days ago, Modern Jinqbao also reported that a consumer bought a mud crab at the market and, after unwrapping it at home, found that the rope tied to each mud crab was more than 30 m long and accounted for more than 20% of the weight.

It is true that frozen shrimp need ice for preservation and mud crabs also need rope to be tied, but ice weighing 3 times as much as the shrimp and more than 30 m of rope for tying a mud crab are a bit unreliable. But it is still hard to say the problem is "unreasonable," because relevant laws and regulations do not have standards for the net content of frozen aquatic products or for how long or heavy the rope tied to a mud crab should be. In other words, the law simply has no such "standard."

Without a "standard," it is very difficult to determine that these unscrupulous merchants have broken the law, and consumers naturally become the suckers. Nationwide, this may not count as much of an issue, but for Ningbo people, who "live off the sea" and rely on seafood and freshwater fish, it is an issue. Even if there is no unified national packaging standard for aquatic products, Ningbo can fully use its advantage of local legislative power to set a "standard" for aquatic product packaging.

The author checked online and found that Xiamen, also a coastal city, is ahead in this regard. The Xiamen Aquatic Product Wholesale Market Management Regulations (Revised Draft) provide that aquatic product packaging should indicate information such as product name, place of origin, production date, shelf life, product quality grade, and producer, and live (fresh) aquatic products should also indicate information such as the time and place of catching or farming.

Of course, Xiamen's regulations mainly start from quality and safety and also seem to lack provisions on packaging proportion. Ningbo can improve on that basis by drawing on it. For example, it can provide that the net weight of aquatic products must be indicated, or provide that the weight of packaging such as ice and rope must not exceed a certain proportion of the net weight. If that proportion is exceeded, it should be regarded as fraud against consumers. Law enforcement agencies may impose heavy penalties, and consumers may also demand triple compensation.

Before this "standard" is introduced, law enforcement departments should also use basic social common sense and flexibly apply relevant laws and regulations to promptly solve practical problems troubling the public. There is a scale between heaven and earth, and that scale's weight is the ordinary people. The ordinary people's common sense of life is also a "standard." For example, in the recently occurring "Qingdao prawns" incident, by reason the merchant has pricing power, and at 38 yuan you can either eat it or not, but whether it is 38 yuan per plate or 38 yuan per prawn cannot be explained however the merchant wants.