China’s reputation as one of the world’s worst food safety offenders with significant effects outside its borders is well known globally.
In 2008, a Chinese company produced tainted formula milk that according to official estimates saw 300,000 babies becoming ill with at least 6 deaths of infants. The problematic issue was that the contamination was by no means a mistake but was designed to deliberately deceive quality control reviews in order to cut costs and increase revenue.
Milk suppliers chose to add melamine (a toxic compound) to adulterated milk to increase the nitrogen content and make the milk appear rich in protein since milk processors only checked protein levels by the measuring nitrogen concentration. This contamination led to children developing kidney stones and infants dying resulting in Chinese dairy products being recalled globally.
In the wake of this reality, many countries have established need assessment food safety control systems in their bilateral food trade with China. Unfortunately for the Kenyan consumers, the country is yet to set up a food safety control system for Chinese food products despite the sharp increase in Chinese food imports especially fish.
Now, a few days ago, China finally agreed to allow various agricultural products from Kenya to preferentially access the Chinese market in an effort to address the heavy imbalance of trade between the two countries and according to the President’s Chief of Staff who was part of the negotiations, the two countries have already entered into formal sanitary and phytosanitary agreements.
This is good news because the crux of an agricultural trade deal is in the sanitary and phytosanitary agreements. What this means is that Kenya needs to rise to the occasion and use this opportunity to push for broader joint safety control systems.
Though sanitary and phytosanitary agreements basically cover agricultural products and doesn’t specifically address food safety nor provide food control system, it largely provides the legal framework to set up internationally accepted food safety standards that facilitates trade of both food and agricultural products between the two countries whilst addressing safety risks.
But the Achilles heel in establishing a joint food safety control system is that China just like Kenya also has a safety enforcement shortcoming not because of ineffective laws but rather ineffective enforcement.
So, the starting point in negotiating for a better food safety regulation will be the two countries admitting that they both have a food safety standards problem then borrow better control systems from Europe and US who possess the best food safety records. For example: the US-China Food Safety agreement is being used as the best model of international trade regulation practices.