How should agricultural product quality and safety supervision be carried out during the 13th Five-Year Plan?
Editor's note: In 2008, the Ministry of Agriculture established the Bureau of Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Supervision. At present, China has basically established a sound provincial, municipal, county and township agricultural product supervision team. Since 2001, China's agricultural product quality and safety development goals have moved from the initial pursuit of quantity growth and the parallel development of quantity and quality to a stage of comprehensive improvement of quality and safety. Entering the 13th Five-Year Plan, what difficulties does agricultural product quality and safety supervision face, and what work can supervision departments at all levels use as leverage? On August 12, the second Agricultural Safety Public Welfare Practical Training Lecture was held in Fenghua City, Zhejiang Province. Let us hear the experts' views and local experience.
"Agricultural products account for more than 70% of food. The quality and safety of agricultural products bears on public health, the image of the government, the survival of enterprises, social stability, and even international trade. Its importance can be described as 'a matter of enormous importance.'" said Cheng Jingen, deputy director of the Bureau of Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture.
According to statistics, in 2015 the overall pass rate of monitoring for major agricultural products in China was 97.1%, among which vegetables, livestock and poultry, and aquatic products were 96.1%, 99.4% and 95.5% respectively. By comparison, the pass rate of industrial products exceeded 90% for the first time in 2014 and reached 91.1% in 2015, among which the pass rate of e-commerce products was 71.3%. During the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, the pass rates of vegetables, livestock and poultry products, and aquatic products rose by 3.0, 0.3 and 4.2 percentage points respectively. It can be said that the quality of China's agricultural products is generally safe and improving.
In 2013, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Notice of the General Office of the State Council on Strengthening the Supervision of Agricultural Product Quality and Safety," which further clarified that local people's governments at all levels bear overall responsibility for the quality and safety of agricultural products in their regions. In the same year, the First Session of the 12th National People's Congress approved the State Council institutional reform plan, reducing the original four-stage supervision to two stages, with the quality and safety supervision responsibilities for edible agricultural products before they enter wholesale or retail markets or production and processing enterprises to be performed by agricultural departments in accordance with the law.
Under the new system, new problems such as how to implement territorial responsibility and resolve gaps in whole-process supervision keep emerging.
Breaking down and implementing territorial responsibility
"Agricultural departments must ensure both quantity security and quality safety; both promote industrial development and safeguard safe consumption of agricultural products; both protect producers' interests and protect consumers' rights and interests." said Cheng Jingen.
Yu Yijun, a researcher at the Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Division of the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Agriculture, introduced that Zhejiang Province's agricultural product quality and safety supervision adopts "territorial management + vertical management," that is, a territorial management model in which local governments bear overall responsibility, strengthening vertical guidance and unification of systems, standards, technology, management, and assessment, so that supervision work below the county level can achieve "dual" management; at the same time, for the district level under municipalities, a vertical management model can be implemented according to actual conditions.
"If territorial management responsibility for agricultural product quality and safety can be implemented well, it can strengthen local government responsibility, with principal Party and government leaders bearing overall responsibility, which is conducive to strengthening supervision work and implementing the two-pronged approach of 'producing safely and managing safely'; coordinate and integrate local supervision resources, coordinate agriculture, food and drug, industry and commerce, public security and other departments, and achieve 'taking multiple measures to promote quality improvement'; at the same time, it can effectively prevent phenomena such as departments shirking responsibility, passing the buck, and responsibility not being fulfilled. However, if local governments do not understand this well and do not attach importance to agricultural product quality and safety work, supervision will be discounted. In addition, if supervision capacity and conditions do not meet supervision needs, and grassroots township supervision suffers from a lack of talent and weak technical strength, then the gap with the requirements of territorial supervision responsibility will be large." said Yu Yijun.
Fenghua City is among the first batch of demonstration counties for agricultural product quality and safety and has a supervision system of "source inspection, process control, and market testing." "In input management, the entire process of agricultural material production and circulation is monitored, and restricted pesticides are withdrawn from Fenghua; 80% of discarded pesticides and agricultural material packaging is recovered, and 100% is harmlessly treated. At the same time, livestock and poultry farms in prohibited zones are all shut down, and those in restricted zones are rectified to meet standards, fully establishing a four-level agricultural product quality and safety monitoring system at the city, town (subdistrict), village and enterprise levels. The 'Green Sword' action is carried out, strictly spot-checking production entities; a traceability system is established to monitor agricultural entities above designated size throughout the process. And relying on Ningbo City's agricultural information platform, whole-process information sharing is achieved." said Wu Weimin, section chief of the Agricultural Safety Section of the Fenghua City Agriculture and Forestry Bureau.
Accelerating the linkage between origin market release and market access
The "Notice of the General Office of the State Council on Issuing the Provisions on the Main Responsibilities, Internal Institutions and Staffing of the State Food and Drug Administration" clearly stipulates that agricultural departments are responsible for quality and safety supervision and management of edible agricultural products from the planting and breeding stage until they enter wholesale or retail markets or production and processing enterprises, and are responsible for supervision and management of the quality and use of veterinary drugs, feed additives, and other inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers within the scope of their duties. After edible agricultural products enter wholesale, retail, or processing enterprises, they are supervised and managed as food by food and drug supervision and management departments. In addition, agricultural departments are also responsible for quality and safety supervision and management of livestock and poultry slaughtering and raw milk purchasing. At the same time, the two departments must establish a food safety traceability mechanism, strengthen coordination, cooperation and work linkage, and form a joint supervisory force.
Yu Yijun introduced that in order to better resolve the problems of departmental coordination, cooperation and work linkage, Zhejiang Province established municipal market supervision bureaus at the municipal level. Among them, 10 cities merged industry and commerce and food and drug supervision bureaus into one, and Zhoushan merged industry and commerce, food and drug supervision, and quality supervision into one; at the county level, market supervision bureaus were established, with 65 merging two bureaus into one and 25 merging three bureaus into one.
The reporter saw in Fenghua City that on the outer packaging of agricultural products waiting to be sold, small "certificates of conformity" were affixed, with information such as product and testing written on the front and a traceable QR code printed on the back.
It is understood that Fenghua City took the lead in implementing the "Edible Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Certificate" system. As of the end of June, more than 30 agricultural production and operation entities in Fenghua City had cumulatively used more than 60,000 certificates of conformity, and this year the whole city aims to achieve full coverage of certificate use.
"Using the certificate of conformity as a carrier, adopting methods such as safety commitments or passing testing, implementing safety production responsibility, establishing an inspection system for collection, storage and transportation links, introducing government testing and verification, and gradually connecting with food and drug departments." said Chen Song, deputy director of the Policy and Information Office of the Institute of Quality Standards and Testing Technology for Agro-Products of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Social co-governance, joint management
"Agricultural product quality and safety supervision must adhere to a problem-oriented approach. Strict management is a hard means and has obvious effects. Find problems through inspections and testing, and solve problems through administrative, judicial and co-governance methods. Standardize production through standardization and technical services, and ensure that what is produced is safe." said Cheng Jingen.
Cheng Jingen analyzed that strengthening supervision focuses on addressing prominent problems, implementing territorial responsibility, and building supervision systems and mechanisms. Among these, addressing prominent problems should pay more attention to addressing leading industries, systemic risks and regional risks.
In promoting agricultural product quality and safety development, the government plays a crucial role, while participation from multiple social forces is also needed. An important aspect of promoting social co-governance is the construction of a credit system. In Zhejiang Province, exploration of integrity management for agricultural product entities has already begun. Deqing County established the province's first agricultural product alliance with integrity as its purpose, with member units authorized to use the "Deqing Sao" regional public brand, developed the Deqing County Integrity Agricultural Product Information System, and set up the "Deqing Sao" Integrity Award Fund. Shaoxing City's agricultural product quality and safety credit management system, meanwhile, places more emphasis on combining credit assessment with project support.
Carrying out risk communication is an important means of solving agricultural product quality and safety problems. In order to encourage public participation, Zhejiang Province has opened agricultural product testing sites to the public free of charge, and rapid testing rooms in 1,165 townships across the province are open to the public free of charge; at the same time, it introduces social supervision, sets up multiple hotlines such as 96317 and 12316, and establishes a reward system for reporting.
In the fields of Tengtou Sizhang Agricultural Development Co., Ltd., signs like this are erected, listing in detail the base introduction, members of the agricultural product quality and safety work leading group of the subdistrict where it is located, the company's quality control organization chart, public notice of testing reports, and standardized cultivation model diagrams for pollution-free greenhouse cherries and strawberries. This is Fenghua City's innovative "construction of public notice boards for agricultural product quality and safety assured bases."
Today, introducing third parties to participate in agricultural product quality and safety work has become an increasingly common phenomenon. Yang Mingsheng, chairman of Beijing Dabang Food Safety Technology Co., Ltd., introduced that the idea of Dabang's "cloud standards" platform is to provide city and county governments with a cloud supervision platform, helping county and township supervisors and assistant supervisors deepen inspection, guidance and law enforcement supervision and implement the duty of "managing well"; at the same time, with its own cloud standards, cloud testing, cloud traceability and cloud agricultural business platforms, it carries out standards services, traceability applications, inspection and testing, production and marketing matching, and consumer guidance services. Through a high-quality, high-price mechanism, it realizes production standardization, supervision gridization, full-process traceability, market-entry certification, and full-domain marketing, greatly improving the capacity to guarantee agricultural product quality and safety.