[Editorial] Stricter punishment for food source misrepresentation

Companies that took imported food products, said they were Korea-made, and sold them to schools for their school lunch programs have been given fines of a few million won or not charged at all. That is a mere slap on the wrist, and it has the potential to make companies think they can get away with illegal behavior and pay a few pennies if they're unlucky enough to get caught. The best way to uproot the sale of low or poor quality food would be to let it be known that violators will suffer the consequences if they break the rules in order to make money off the food people eat. When it comes to corruption related to food consumed by young people still in the process of maturation, the punishment needs to be even stricter.

The Seoul police began investigating various suppliers last November and investigated for more than six months. In May of this year, it charged 19 suppliers with crimes. They were accused of importing seafood products from other countries and selling them as if they came from Korea or were caught by Korean fishermen. The penalties they were given, however, were far too weak compared to the social outrage at the time. The largest supplier was freed of suspicion and others paid only a few million won. There will be no end to corruption in the food industry if this is the way it's going to be.

The question being asked in reaction to the weak punishment is whether there were problems in the way the case was handled by the police and the prosecution. Seoul police authorities charged these companies and sent their files to the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office, but it in turn sent each file to the prosecution districts that had jurisdiction over each company. The largest company's case went to the South Seoul District Prosecutor's Office, and it had the Seoul Gangseo Police Station investigate the companies in the area of Gangseo. This resulted in an unnecessary division of the investigations into local cases. In addition, the police are saying they had no way to investigate the companies in the middle of the process, the middle men, when in other jurisdictions.

It is more than your average problem if cases fizzle out like this all because of a lack of adequate cooperation between investigative agencies, which need to take a closer look at what happened because of jurisdiction issues and find ways to work better between themselves and within their own organizations.

In the meantime, the country needs stricter punishment for crimes like these, and it needs to reevaluate how it oversees school food programs, all the more so because in the wake of this whole episode, we are hearing criticism of the state of seafood products as a whole. The least that adults must do is make sure young people are able to eat foods that are safe.

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