A country with a bad food safety record aspires to lead a new approach to setting food safety practices in international trade. This is part of China's plan to leverage its Belt & Road Initiative in order to boost its influence in setting international rules, standards, and inspection practices. So far, it's off to a slow start.
On October 15, China's customs administration held a meeting of its 2-year-old "Import & Export Food Safety Cooperation Mechanism for the Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative" in Shanghai with participants from food agencies and embassies of 21 Belt and Road countries.
Director General of the Customs Administration Sun Meijun stated that China's customs administration is willing to work with food safety authorities of all countries to collaborate on food safety regulation and promote safer and more efficient trade in food and agricultural products. At the meeting member countries affirmed the "Shanghai Declaration on Promoting Trade Facilitation and Sharing Food Safety" and launched a "Silk Road Food Safety" information platform.
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| No, not a game show. 11 country reps + China Customs Director Sun signed the terms of reference for China's import-export food safety initiative at the Shanghai meeting. |
According to Director Sun, the food safety mechanism will:
- be guided by morality and rule of law
- give food enterprises the primary responsibility for quality and safety
- adhere to scientific supervision that gives full play to international rules and standards
- strive for shared responsibility for food safety throughout the entire chain from farm to table.
Sun also mentioned that this food safety initiative is part of China's aspiration to engage in global governance. She did not mention it, but the idea for the BRI food safety initiative dates back 10 years to the 2016-20 and 2021-25 five-year plans.
China launched the "Import & Export Food Safety Cooperation Mechanism for the Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative" in 2023. At this month's meeting 11 new countries signed the charter, bringing the total member countries to 18. My arithmetic indicates there were only 7 countries before this month's meeting was held. China claims to have over 150 countries in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), so participation is not overwhelming. There does not seem to be a list of members, but countries mentioned in articles about the initiative include Indonesia, Belarus, Iran, South Africa, Turkey, Cambodia, Bolivia, Brunei, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.
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| Chinese Customs held a belt and road food safety training session in Shanghai during September 2025 for attendees from Brunei, Mongolia, Pakistan, Serbia, Rwanda, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and Panama |
News about the October 15 Shanghai meeting was featured in several articles on the Chinese version of the customs web site and other Chinese state media. English articles in China Daily and other State media outlets briefly mentioned the Shanghai meeting, emphasizing granting of access to new products and downplaying the BRI food safety mechanism.
State media claims that food trade with BRI countries grew 2.5% this year. That was less than half the 6.2% growth in all trade with BRI countries.
In a world under China's food safety governance, look for inflexible and overly detailed traceability requirements, zero tolerances for certain substances, blanket bans of meat from an entire country when a disease outbreak occurs in a particular region, enforcement/inspections that oscillate between lax and excessively strict depending on China's market/political situation, and promises of efficient transmission of documents belied by numerous rejections of imported foods each month for documentation problems. In short, excessively complex requirements for which Chinese inspectors can always find a violation if they want to.
In September Chinese customs rejected 443 food shipments, but the list is released only in a Chinese pdf. Rejections included dozens of shrimp shipments from Ecuador containing sodium metabisulfite or animal disease, bird nests from Indonesia that contained aluminum, beef from Argentina and Brazil with incomplete documentation, bird nests from Vietnam with registration problems, milk chocolate candy from India with improper labels, shrimp from Pakistan with incomplete documents, non-GMO rapeseed oil from Kazakhstan containing GMOs, beef broth from Vietnam with salmonella, degraded pistachios from Iran, and beef from Mongolia with high bacteria counts.
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