China makes arrests over food

Safety Push Follows a Spate of Contamination Incidents; Officials Close Thousands of Businesses

BEIJING—China said authorities have arrested more than 2,000 people and shut 5,000 businesses in a four-month campaign against recurring food safety problems, following a spate of recent contamination woes.

The arrests resulted from inspections begun in April of nearly six million businesses in the country's food manufacturing industry by some 3.5 million enforcement officers, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, citing China's Food Safety Commission.

China's government frequently trumpets crackdowns and mass arrests to demonstrate its seriousness in tackling social problems, but it is unclear how effective the latest effort will be in improving food safety.

The government executed the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration in 2007 for taking bribes, and it issued harsh sentences to several people responsible for a 2008 scandal in which milk contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine killed at least six children and caused illnesses in nearly 300,000 others. That incident also prompted the government to vow stricter food oversight and to overhaul the food industry, and resulted in the creation of the Food Safety Commission.

But a series of fresh incidents in recent months has shown how deeply entrenched the problems are. Last month, for example, a court in central China's Henan province sentenced a man for producing and dealing clenbuterol after hundreds of people were sickened from eating pork tainted with the chemical, which speeds muscle growth in pigs but can cause headaches in humans. The court sentenced him to death with a two-year reprieve—meaning it could be commuted to life in prison—and handed prison sentences of nine to 15 years for four others involved, according to Xinhua.

Experts say safety issues have to do largely with the structure of China's food industry, which is extremely fragmented, making production oversight difficult. China has some 200 million farming households and 400,000 food-processing enterprises with fewer than 10 employees, said Christopher Hickey, the China director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The government has said it wants to consolidate the agricultural and food manufacturing sectors, but the process has been slow—in part because officials need to balance that desire against the need to keep hundreds of millions of rural residents employed.

Enforcement is also a continuing issue, according to Wu Ming, a professor of public health at Peking University. Major food safety campaigns followed by long periods in which there is no enforcement of regulations enables violators to hide temporarily and reappear, she said.

Surging inflation—which is currently at a three-year high—has further aggravated the problem, said Sang Liwei, a Beijing director at the nonprofit organization Global Food Safety Forum. While food prices have been leading that trend, food producers—who often operate on thin profit margins in China—are feeling squeezed by higher costs for things like fuel and labor. "When they add chemicals to food, they're looking to make meat leaner or vegetables bigger so they can make more money," Mr. Sang said.

In the recent crackdown, authorities investigated 1,200 criminal cases in which nonedible chemicals illegal for food use were added to food during its production, said the Xinhua report, issued Wednesday. Authorities also destroyed the processing facilities where the chemicals were produced and stored. The campaign is a joint effort between the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Food and Drug Administration, and several other agencies, Xinhua said.

—Yoli Zhang contributed to this article.