What do the Beijing Games have to do with this week’s diplomatic hissy-fit between Chinese and European Union senior officials over product safety? Following months of export scandals and Western recalls of flawed Chinese goods, the Beijing Olympics media center laid on a Nov. 12 press visit to a string of chicken-processing, pig-butchering and product-inspection facilities to emphasize the city’s commitment to food safety.

Among other things we saw neat assembly lines of pig carcasses being sawed, sliced and cut into bits. While graphic, the scenes bore little resemblance to how we imagine most meat gets processed in China, evoking the Chicago abattoirs of Upton Sinclair’s time. Chinese factory officials bent over backwards to assure us their high standards guaranteed food safety for ALL Beijing citizens, not just visiting Olympians. That was to deflate rumors that secret pig-raising centers had been established to guaranteed hormone-free “pampered” pork for Olympic athletes – gossip which blogger Andrew Lih dubbed “the Olympic pig conspiracy.”

The timing of that media event seemed quite the coincidence when, this past week, Beijing opened a big international food-safety conference. That’s when the high-level catfight erupted. First EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson tore into Chinese authorities for their record of unsafe exports and “tidal wave” of counterfeits. “During the summer some Chinese officials pointed out that less than 1 percent of China’s exports to Europe had alleged health risks,” he declared, “But Europe imports half a billion euros worth of goods from China daily, so even 1 percent is not acceptable.”

Mandelson’s rant was “unfair” and “inappropriate for today’s occasion”, maintained Wei Chuanzhong, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (one of the organizations that featured during our little press trip, by the way). Chinese vice premier Wu Yi-- Beijing’s top trade official, nicknamed the “Iron Lady” -- was even more miffed. She declared herself “extremely unhappy” with Mandelson’s remarks and defended China’s efforts to improve quality control and crack down on pirated goods.

Later that same day, Mandelson riposted that Wu should not have taken exception to his statement that four-fifths of the counterfeit items pouring over Europe’s borders originate in China. “We must seek truth from facts,” he said, citing a phrase identified with Beijing’s late strongman Deng Xiaoping.

What exactly are the facts surrounding China’s food-safety record, and why are Western officials so concerned? Here’s an interview my colleague Han Songmei conducted with Dr Roger Skinner, who’s investigated China’s food safety system as a consultant for the World Health Organization. The London-based specialist is lead author of a report on suggested reforms that was sponsored by China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), the World Health Organization and the Asian Development Bank. Skinner was remarkably candid; check out these excerpts:

Han: Your report has been presented to China’s State Council, or cabinet, but it hasn’t yet been published. What does it say?

It [sets] out in incredibly clear terms what needs to be done in a practical way.

My concern about the Chinese is they’re very good at setting out the grand objective but they’re very bad at setting out how you achieve it….There’s no particular ministry that has the responsibility for dealing with food safety so when something does go wrong there’s no one there to whom you can say ‘It was your responsibility and you blew it’.

Q: Can you give concrete examples?

A: Four or five different authorities have the authority to go into supermarkets and test things on the shelves, and impose a fine. Because it happens so often the supermarkets are not happy about. It adds up to a very considerable sum of money. [Take] bottled water. They may find one millilitre less than there should be in the bottle…but in terms of public health it’s irrelevant.[They] have to develop some sort of rational, coherent approach, and as far as I can see there’s nobody in China doing that because there are too many players pursuing their own interests. Six government agencies have mainstream responsibilities for food safety, and there are 17 departments or agencies involved altogether.

A: How big a problem is unsafe food? Your report suggested an economic cost of US$4.7 to US$14 billion in 2005, based on medical costs and productivity losses due to food-borne disease.

A: I would be very, very concerned about the controls that exist in relation to foodstuff generally. It’s very difficult to know how big the problem is because the statistics are not there.

Q: What are the major weaknesses of the current inspection system?

A: Authorities are obsessed with testing, which is fundamentally wrong…. The only way of ensuring safe food is you control the production process using hazard analysis at critical control points.

Q: What’s the scale of the present inspection system in terms of budget and headcount? Are rural areas less well-equipped?

A: That’s information that’s impossible to get in China… My impression is that staffing in the SFDA is just inadequate. In broad terms, the central government is under-resourced to do the job.

Q: You’ve called for a Basic Food Law in China. What are the major shortcomings of the current legal framework?

A: The [current] food hygiene law did not contain an obligation that food should be safe and fit for human consumption. To give an example, in 2005 there were reports about children dying because they had inhaled konjac gum, and this is a problem we had faced in Europe so I surprised to see this. They were unable to do anything about it because there was no regulation, no standard, regarding children’s sweets in China. Enforcement had to be based on a regulation, and in the absence of a regulation they couldn’t do any enforcement. This struck me as a fundamental problem with the Chinese food safety law.

You need to have a catch-all, ‘This must not contain any hazard to human health’ so [that] you have a fundamental basis to protect the consumers if something turns up you didn’t predict. It may seem terribly obvious, but after all you do need that. That was one reason I felt there needed to be a basic food law.

Q: You worked for the UK Department of Health during the crisis over BSE (or Mad Cow Disease) in the 1980s, when British beef exports were blocked, and you gave evidence to the public inquiry. What did you learn from that crisis?

A: The biggest lesson… is communication with the public…People need to be brought into the things, people need to have the information on which they can act, and they’re grateful for it. The problem with BSE is they were denied the ability to exercise their own choice.