People have right to know what chickens eat

CCTV recently reported that certain domestic chicken farmers fed their chickens with more than 20 kinds of medicines, mostly antibiotics, to boost their growth. These chickens were raised in dirty environments, did not sleep at all, and were slaughtered after over 40 days of growth.

Poultry experts said that "fast-growing" chickens were not as terrible as many thought. As chicken rearing techniques improve, it is totally achievable to raise chickens quickly from a technological perspective. However, they should not be fed excessive amounts of medicines, especially illegal medicines.

Consumers could not tell whether the chickens were fed illegal medicines or contained excessive amounts of related substances until they try them out, but this process could be risky and even costly.

The buyers do not know about the quality of goods so they distrust in the sellers, which lead to increase of transaction costs and market contraction and even disappearance.

Due to the asymmetric information and lack of supervision, the bosses of chicken farms do not consider the consumers and boldly use illegal drugs and excessive doses on chickens to reduce the costs, thus harming the interests of consumers.

The incident of fast-growing chickens posed a question ignored by the field of food safety: How to strengthen disclosure of food safety information?

After investigation and survey, Chinese Academy of Social Science found that the information disclosure for food safety information is less than 70 percent.

How do the government agencies conduct information exchanges and share and establish a food safety information platform? How can food safety information be conveyed to consumers quickly and effectively? How to establish continuous and dynamic information disclosure system? Those questions still remained to be answered to improve the food safety.