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Ethical Reflections on the Process of Food Production in China

  • Conference paper
Food Security and Food Safety for the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

The article firstly discusses the ubiquitous food safety issue, such as milk powder contamination, poisonous additive within ham and vegetables, and excessive pesticide residues. These examples are the start of our concern about the process of food production in China. There are four main reasons for our discussion, including the importance of agricultural civilization and China’s international role, vicious food safety incidents frequently happened in China, small-scale and highly fragmented food producers, and the imperfect food supervision system in China. Furthermore, food ethics study will be included in the paper, mainly discussing the fundamental moral responsibility, utilitarianism or pragmatic ethics, duty-based ethics, etc., in the process of planting, growing, and processing the agricultural products and the animal by-products. At the same time, the regulation principle will be given for these issues to ensure pollution-free and safety food production and on this basis to provide the evidence for the regulation of the food practitioner.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge Prof. Franck L.B. Meijboom for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also like to thank Prof. Soraj Hongladarom very much for his generous invitation to us for the first international conference of the Asia-Pacific Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (APSAFE).

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Correspondence to Li Jianjun .

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Bing, Z., Jianjun, L. (2015). Ethical Reflections on the Process of Food Production in China. In: Hongladarom, S. (eds) Food Security and Food Safety for the Twenty-first Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-417-7_15

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