BEIJING: Fish could give you cancer, snails meningitis and baby milk may kill your children – barely a day goes by without some new food horror story in China.

This is helping drive sales in another, though still tiny, food sector in China – organic produce.

But a loose regulatory framework and sometimes just plain confusion about what exactly constitutes organic food has proved a stumbling block, experts say.

“It’s been a difficult start, but gradually there has become more of a domestic market, and I think it will take off in the next few years,” said Paul Thiers, an associate professor at Washington State University.

“The food safety scares are a definite driver of people’s desire to buy organic, and I think that’s true in urban China as much as it is in other parts of the world,” added Thiers, who is also a visiting professor at China Agricultural University.

China has 5.7 million acres of certified organic farmland, according to the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, although that is less than one percent of the country’s total farmed land.

Sales grew an estimated 50 per cent last year, but a lot of China’s organic produce is actually exported. Even President Hu Jintao has waded in. Last month he called for greater efforts to develop organic farming, showing just how concerned Beijing has become about food and consumer safety.

While tales of heavy metals in vegetables, poisonous dyes in eggs and fake drugs have been a staple diet of the Chinese press for the past few years, it has taken pet deaths in the United States to draw world attention to the problem.

Two food processors in China are suspected of adding the chemical melamine to vegetable proteins used in feed for pets, hogs, poultry and fish. It was also detected in animal feed, but US officials insist that presents no real risk to humans.—Reuters