Three years after a melamine-tainted milk scandal destroyed public confidence in the dairy industry, it remains the most fragile part of the mainland food sector, and is widely distrusted.
That perhaps explains why the public finds it hard to believe that there was nothing underhand in the revision of raw milk standards last year, despite repeated explanations by the authorities. The new standards, unveiled in March and implemented three months later, represented a substantial lowering of the bar compared with the previous standards, in place since 1986.
Those doubts exploded last month when the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily, quoting two experts who were involved in setting the new standards, suggested the process had been 'hijacked' by dairy industry giants, resulting in much lower standards.
'Basically, confidence in the dairy industry and even the food safety authorities has been eaten up,' said Professor Zhu Yi, from the Nutrition Engineering Institute at China Agricultural University. 'Raw milk and dairy farmers were blamed for the melamine-tainted milk scandal three years ago, yet time passed and the public has not seen much progress. No explanation, no matter how scientific it sounds, can make up for the disappointment.'
The new standards allow as many as two million bacteria per millilitre of raw milk, whereas the old standards allowed four grades, ranging from four million to 500,000. Even the lowest level allowed before was way above standards in the West, with Europe and the United States setting maximum bacteria levels of 100,000 per millilitre and industry standards often setting the maximum at 50,000. The new mainland standards also lowered the minimum protein content of raw milk from 2.95 grams per hundred grams to 2.8 grams, a significant step away from the developed world standard of 3 grams.
'Call it Chinese characteristics; no one is really sure what happened because of the lack of transparency,' said one anonymous dairy association official.
