Monday, January 29, 2007

PR War? Current Food Safety Scandals in Hong Kong


Food Safety is a very hot issue in the city at the moment.


Last Tuesday (2007/01/22), environmental pressure group Greenpeace claimed banned chemicals have been found in samples of mainland strawberries and tangerines being sold in Hong Kong local markets. They campaigned for urgent food safety legislation as well as clear standards for residual pesticides on fruit and veggie. Greenpeace than converged on the Centre for Food Safety (CFS) and dumped buckets of fresh fruit at its front door in order to blast the authorities for being incompetent in halting imports of tainted food products into the territory.

This action was held between 10:30am-11:30am. Around 40 medias attended the actions and the news become the headline news for the mid-day TV and radio news broadcasts. An official response was released by the CFS saying that “the department would not comment on the results of tests carried out by other organizations” and emphasized their test is based on International standard.

Around 3:00pm the same day, CFS suddenly called up all medias that they were going to have a PC at 6:00pm to announce “something”. Information Officer from the CFS did/could not explain details about the PC and just mentioned that they would release something about “fish”. The PC turned out was the CFS said it had received complaints from 14 people who fell ill after consuming oil fish said to have been wrongly labeled as codfish, which the products were bought from the supermarket giant ParknShop. Than, this food scare erupted across the whole city and ParknShop becomes the main target for public impeachment.

If people view these two issue cynically, it can be concluded the CFS uses one food scandal to override another food scandal, than shifting all/part of the public’s target from CFS to ParknShop. Using a scandal to prevail another scandal is an old, simple and direct media/PR strategy, but it does work at most time.

Maybe it is too skeptical and the comment is a bit in hindsight, but the current food scandals is a good demonstration about how the HK authorities to tackle humiliations.



News Links:

Greenpeace in toxic fruit fight

Label mistake revealed in oilfish saga


Thursday, January 11, 2007

Friday, January 05, 2007

Today's Snapshot

Sunset at Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong