Down on the farm in China

Big Apple posts this story today in the Fresh Produce Industry Discussion Group, detailing life on the farm in China. Suddenly, China's reassurances about its food safety regulatory framework seem less than sufficient after reading this article from the Washington Post Foreign Service. From the story:

The answer to why even the most well-intentioned and smartest policies of China's leaders have been so difficult to implement in a country so vast lies in small farmers like Li. With 200 million farming households and 500,000 food-producing companies, information about new science often doesn't trickle out to remote areas for months or years -- if ever.
The way Li farms is mostly passed down from her parents and grandparents, she says. Her only other source of information is the pesticide salesmen. In the eight years she has been here, they are the only ones who have come to teach her anything new.
So whenever insects descend on the melon fields and cornfields, Li stirs up some pesticide cocktails and sprays. The label says to use it every 15 days. But if the pests are especially resilient, she doesn't hesitate to reapply it in a week. Doing otherwise would endanger the roughly $1,300 that she is struggling to earn this year. Li, 32, said she doesn't understand much about the chemicals except that "they are very strong. They kill everything."

TK: Of course, one postage stamp farm does not translate to every export oriented commercial fruit and vegetable firm. But the multitude of small farmers relying on "pesticide cocktails" is no great endorsement of regulatory oversight in China.