Food safety requires joint efforts from all links to be guaranteed

Recently, at the ninth training session for directors of major national agriculture, animal husbandry and fishery counties and the national agricultural product quality and safety demonstration county class held at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, how to strengthen supervision of agricultural product quality and safety became the focus of discussion. The trainees unanimously agreed that the agricultural product quality and safety chain is linked link by link and requires simultaneous efforts in several aspects: implementing producers' primary responsibility, strictly controlling “inputs”, and establishing and improving an agricultural product traceability system.

Agricultural product producers are the responsible entities for “safety on the tip of the tongue”. Luo Xiong, deputy secretary of the Agricultural Working Committee of Rongchang County, Chongqing, told reporters that the current Law on the Quality and Safety of Agricultural Products covers enterprises and cooperatives as production entities, but does not involve farmer households and large producers. In real life, however, the scale of many large producers may exceed that of cooperatives. Large producers remain outside legal supervision, creating a “vacuum” in the supervision of agricultural product quality and safety and resulting in low costs for farmer households violating the law and difficulty for administrative departments in enforcement. It is hoped that when the law is revised, these production entities can be included in the supervision system.

Establishing an agricultural product traceability system ensures “safety on the tip of the tongue”. Guo Wenfeng, director of the Agriculture Bureau of Changning City, Hunan Province, believes that establishing a traceable system for agricultural product quality and safety plays a huge role in raising farmer households' sense of responsibility and the quality of agricultural products, and enterprises are also actively building such systems. The current problem is that creating safety files for agricultural products and attaching QR codes increases labor costs considerably, and the market access threshold for agricultural products is too low, so the market premium and advantages of agricultural products with traceability systems are not reflected.

⟦NL> Safe and rational use of pesticides is the foundation for achieving “safety on the tip of the tongue”. Huang Zhirao, division chief of the Department of Agriculture of Guangdong Province, said that pesticide management authority is currently distributed among many government departments, and generally speaking the agriculture department has very little management authority. It is hoped that coordination can be carried out at the national level to concentrate pesticide management authority for better supervision and to ensure that farmers can use pesticides safely and with confidence.

Achieving social co-governance is a necessary path to ensuring “safety on the tip of the tongue”. Chu Yunbao, deputy director of the Agriculture Bureau of Yunfu City, Guangdong Province, said that through research Yunfu City found that traditional cultural concepts such as assisting childbirth and promoting education in rural areas and loyalty, filial piety, benevolence and righteousness still influence the production and life of the masses in rural life. At the same time, a large number of rural elites, especially those who have gone out, harbor a strong desire to return to their roots and give back to their hometowns. Yunfu City took advantage of this trend to establish “village sage councils” in each villager group to assist grassroots Party organizations in supervising agricultural product quality and safety issues and urge farmers to strictly implement relevant national regulations in the planting and breeding process, achieving good results.