What price health over a bargain?

THE eagerly anticipated free-trade agreement with China hasn’t come into effect — that is likely to happen in August — but we’re starting this week to learn some useful lessons about limits to what can be traded helpfully between us, and how.

Australians use a vast array of Chinese goods every day. We wear them, we enjoy them, we rely on them. China is our biggest source of imports.

For the most part, Australian consumers are clearly happy to be buying Chinese — usually, for value and convenience.

Sometimes we’re not even aware, as in the now-notorious case of the berries carrying hepatitis, that the product comes from China.

Global sourcing and production chains, which have done so much to reduce prices worldwide, make it ever harder to determine a single origin.

In the case of many products, we can determine over time the value of the unwritten contract of the brand under which they’re badged. If they break or wear out quickly, we’ll look elsewhere next time, but food is a special case. Lives and health patently depend on it.

If Australians had been paying attention, they might have not­iced that in recent years China’s consumers have grown anxious and, at times, angry over the reckless opportunism in areas of their food industry, which has placed their own health, especially that of their children, at risk.

Regulations are usually ­ade­quate in theory. In practice, their implementation clearly remains haphazard.

President Xi Jinping has put his career on the line to pursue with extraordinary zeal the kind of casual corruption that leads food regulators to avert their eyes from grossly dangerous practices.

If he can grapple China’s own system — with its lack of ­political accountability — into ­effective compliance with modern rules for food production, then full marks.

Australian consumers need to be told where their food comes from — rather more importantly than where it is repacked.

Our two dominant retailers, with their power over the choices available to us, must consider safety and quality, not just price, as priorities when choosing to which products they grant shelf or fridge space.

Chinese consumers are clearly willing to pay a premium for safe foods from Australia — and the FTA will make that process easier and cheaper for them, to all our benefits.

What kind of premium, then, should we be willing to pay for those same clean, green products made here?