ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on those policies that showed little regard towards the Chinese people’s destiny in terms of food safety. China changed its food policy emphasis from grain production to the production of other cash crops such as vegetables and fruits in the mid-1980s. In order to increase food production, the government encouraged farmers to use chemical pesticides. Poor handling, storage and distribution systems with inadequate temperature-controlled infrastructure and the use of cheap, but unsafe, additives and toxic dyes to preserve food and improve its appearance also contributed to the issue of food pollution. China has not paid much attention to food safety, although it began to take some measures in the 1990s. In January 2003, each food processing company engaging in exports was required to write the registration number of the production base in its export documentation in accordance with standard international regulations, which are based on traceability.
