In Beijing's food industry, the penalty for causing serious indigestion could be incarceration.
With the Olympic Games only 14 weeks away, the spotlight is falling on dinner plates and food carts in the Chinese capital. Amid promises from municipal officials that athletes and audiences would be guaranteed safe food during the Games, China has published its new draft food safety law, which lays out penalties from fines to life in prison for makers of substandard food.
According to the draft, producers of substandard food products would face fines, the confiscation of their incomes and revocation of production certificates. In serious cases, they could face prison terms ranging from three years to life. The draft law has recently been published for public comment.
While it is being tweaked, a city official said in a news conference Thursday that Beijing, "has established a comprehensive food safety control mechanism that covers the whole process, from production to the table, to make sure Olympics food is entirely safe," Ma Lin, director of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission said in a report carried by the official news agency Xinhua.
Ma said the city has established 25 local food safety standards since 2002 and has chosen nine farms in greater Beijing as designated sources of major food products, such as meat and vegetables, for the Games. Olympic-destined food produced in other cities and provinces is inspected under the same strict standards, he said.
A food tracing system based on bar codes will identify the origin, processing and even the seeds from which vegetables were grown and sources of livestock used for meats, Ma said.
"We had a trial of the food produce tracing system in the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games held in Shanghai. It was a success," Ma said.
