IF ONLY it had come sooner. An online listing of the provenance of Chinese foods is being created that might have contained the recent melamine-in-milk scandal.
ChinaTrace, a joint venture between the Shandong Institute of Standardization in China and TraceTracker of Oslo, Norway, will create electronic 鈥渇ood passports鈥� stating how ingredients of foods for export were sourced and what, if any, tests they have undergone.
While technologies to track food through the supply chain will probably be welcome, without regulation, the industry is unlikely to be cleaned up. Fang Shi Min, founder of New Threads, a website that exposes fraud and corruption in China, says milk adulteration has been a problem for at least 10 years, first with urea and now melamine. 鈥淚t鈥檚 widely practised and an open secret,鈥� he says.
Advertisement
