China cooking oil scandal exposes food safety problem

A scandal over cooking-oil contamination in China that came to light earlier in July highlights the longstanding struggle to improve food safety measures. The scandal, first revealed by state-backed media The Beijing News on July 2, involves two Chinese companies that reportedly used fuel trucks to transport edible oil without any cleaning process between loads.

Authorities announced a high-level investigation amid public outrage. "What's most important is how to convince the people that similar incidents will never happen again," read one comment that got thousands of likes on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo. This is not the first nationwide scandal over food safety issues.

In 2005 and 2015, Chinese media uncovered similar practices of improperly transporting food oil. Another food safety problem known to authorities is the use of "gutter oil," which is cooking oil recycled from drains and grease traps, and cheaply sold off to restaurants.

John Kojiro Yasuda, an associate professor of political science at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University in the US, who has researched Chinese regulatory reform, told DW that this latest episode indicated that China is still "at the beginning stages of transforming its food system," despite decades of effort.

"It's really a work in progress. This isn't something that will be solved overnight," he said. The investigative report into the latest scandal revealed that two tanker trucks had been loaded with cooking oil for delivery immediately after carrying chemical products, a cost-saving measure that the media said had become an "open secret" in the supply chain.

The two companies implicated in the report are state transport and storage company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group. Both companies have launched their own investigations in response to the allegations.

"The edible oil transport industry is effectively in a state of unregulated chaos," an editor of The Beijing News said in a video report, attributing the problem to inadequate manufacturer oversight and a lack of mandatory transport standards.

While China has guidelines suggesting dedicated vehicles for vegetable oils, these are merely "recommended" standards that leave manufacturers room to cut corners, the editor reported. Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told DW that switching between chemicals and cooking oil shipments was unacceptable, even if the tanks are cleaned between uses. "You just don't drink from the toilet even though it's cleaned," Huang said.

Huang added that simply strengthening regulations would not solve the underlying problem in China's food safety system. China already has some of the world's strictest food safety laws, the first versions of which were implemented in 2009. There have been several amendments over the years.

But Huang said what was needed was better enforcement. In 2018, China launched an institutional reform that abolished the country's Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) and merged agencies in charge of food and drug products into a new authority directly subordinate to the State Council.

"That means the function of regulating food safety has been undermined," Huang told DW. He added that the Chinese government should have given its FDA more power to surpass the central ministry level.

Yasuda told DW other factors should also be considered given the complexity of China's fragmented food market.

Apart from robust regulations and government oversight, he said it was critical to have "a fairly vigilant consumer base that can actively punish noncompliance among food safety suppliers." In addition, he said, the modernization of farms was much needed as the sheer number of food producers and distributors is "overwhelming" even in modern-day China.

"When you're dealing with anywhere between 150 to 200 million farms. It's very challenging to monitor from the ground level up," Yasuda said. The food safety office of China's State Council has promised that those responsible for any malpractice "will be severely punished."

In 2008, two businessmen convicted of producing and selling infant formula laced with the chemical melamine were sentenced to death, prompting a food safety law to be passed a year later. China's leader Xi Jinping has repeatedly vowed to tackle the country's notorious food safety problems since taking office over a decade ago. In a 2013 speech, he warned that the Communist Party's legitimacy would be questioned if it "cannot even do a good job in food safety."

But though Beijing says it views food safety as a priority, Yasuda expressed doubt that it would be willing to "open the floodgates of empowering consumers and the media" to solve the problem. In the wake of the recent cooking oil scandal, Chinese media have reported that an app allowing users to track trucks across the country was disabled. Beijing News reporter Han Futao, who first revealed the malpractice, was found to have his Weibo account deleted.