INDONESIA: MUI wary amid barrage of Chinese Halal food exports

By The Halal Journal Newsdesk (Source: The Jakarta Post) published 9 hours ago

Original Article Source: The Jakarta Post

The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) confirms a sharp rise in Halal food products coming from China, but it remains sceptical over China’s Halal industry, which is presumed to still be in its developmental stages.

“The number of Halal products from China has increased by 50 to 100 percent since last year,” MUI Food and Drug Analysis Agency (LPPOM) chief Lukmanul Hakim told The Jakarta Post. He said that some of China’s Halal food exports — which far exceeded those from Europe and the US — came from Ningxia, a province known for its Muslim Hui ethnicity. Muslims in Ningxia account for around 38 percent of the province’s 6.3 million residents. The province recently announced it had developed a Halal industry to accommodate not just the needs of Chinese Muslims but also Muslims in other countries.

Ningxia’s Halal food commission said that the province had more than 10,000 factories and restaurants that were certified Halal. The region’s Halal industry, which is supported by a high tech laboratory, 15 experts and 300 staffers, was currently worth up to 50 million RMB (US$7.9 million). The commission added that the industry had been working with foreign counterparts since 2008, cooperating on a reciprocal basis with Halal institutions in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Malaysia, with Indonesia soon to join the mix.

Lukmanul acknowledged the booming development of China’s Halal industry, but said that the

LPPOM, acting as Indonesia’s Halal certification authority, did not see itself engaging in any Chinese cooperation in the near future. “They can cooperate with Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, but here we pay great attention to standards and human resource competency. It is not just a matter of issuing a certificate.”

According to Lukmanul, establishing cooperation with foreign Halal institutions meant agreeing to the validity of their certification systems and trusting their assessments of products to be exported to Indonesia.

The LPPOM has so far approved the Halal certification of 46 overseas institutions from 22 countries including the US, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and the Netherlands. For all its Halal exports to Indonesia, China did not make the list.

“We are not yet able to approve their Halal certification, partly because of their political situation,” Lukmanul said.

He explained that the MUI had to consider China’s trade policy. He said that given the country’s dominance and pragmatic approach in the politics of trade, China could be inclined to sacrifice Halal aspects in favour of economic efficiency.

“China knows that the [Halal] market is here. They are willing to follow any foreign standards as long as they succeed in getting into the country. The MUI has to decide what is best, and, for the moment, our hearts are telling us no,” he said.

Lukmanul believed that China’s surge in Halal product exports — including those to Indonesia — was more of a reflection of its economic sensibilities than its Muslim growth.

Therefore, the MUI decided that it was best to take on the responsibility of assessing Chinese Halal products independently rather than leaving it up to a local institution.

“We have to make sure that they are really Halal,” he said.

As of the first eight months of this year, Indonesia’s non-oil and gas imports from China reached $16.4 billion, up by 27 percent compared to last year, making a total trade deficit of $3.55 billion.

How Democracy Became Halal

IN the Western study of medieval Islamic history, the institution of iqta — land grants from the sovereign to his soldiers — once loomed large, because scholars searched for reasons behind the Muslim failure to develop feudalism, and with it the contractual relationships that eventually led to constitutional government. But looking for parallels between the West and Islam — especially the classical Islamic heartland from North Africa to Iran — has always been politically a sad endeavor, since the region seemed so resistant to the ideas and institutions that made representative government possible.
President George W. Bush’s decision to build democracy in Iraq seemed so lame to many people because it appeared, at best, to be another example of American idealism run amok — the forceful implantation of a complex Western idea into infertile authoritarian soil. But Mr. Bush, whose faith in self-government mirrors that of a frontiersman in Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” saw truths that more worldly men missed: the idea of democracy had become a potent force among Muslims, and authoritarianism had become the midwife to Islamic extremism.
One of the great under-reported stories of the end of the 20th century was the enormous penetration of the West’s better political ideas — democracy and individual liberty — into the Muslim consciousness. For those of us who speak and read Persian, the startling evolution was easier to see. Theocracy-versus-democracy has been a defining theme of the Islamic Republic of Iran since the revolution, which harnessed both Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s religious charisma and the secular intelligentsia’s democratic aspirations. Over the last three decades, clerical Iran has nurtured an intense intellectual discourse about the duties that man owes to God.
When the legitimacy of theocracy started to unravel amid the regime’s corruption and brutality in the late 1980s, democratic ideas, including powerful democratic interpretations of the Islamic faith, roared forth. The explosion on the streets after the fraudulent presidential elections of June 2009 was just the most visible eruption of the enormous democratic pressures that had built up underneath the republic’s autocracy. More regime-threatening moments are surely coming.
Today’s Arab societies — less intellectually vibrant than Iran, in great part because their regimes have been more effective in shutting down internal debate — have become increasingly schizophrenic. Long before the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, Arab liberal secular intellectuals had divided. Except for the fearless, who went to prison, liberals who didn’t flee their homelands usually became “court liberals,” whose views never seriously challenged the rulers.
Aware of the dismal fates of their kind in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, they faithfully echoed the anti-Islamist, après-moi-le-déluge fears that the region’s autocrats used in Washington whenever American officials objected to tyranny. Democracy remained for them a cherished ideal, attainable at some future date when the Islamists had lost their appeal and the despots their power.
The secular intellectuals in exile, however, more forcefully embraced the democratic cause — their newspapers, books, magazines, Web sites and, increasingly, appearances on Al Jazeera — delivered their views back home. Intellectuals of such diverse viewpoints as Kanan Makiya, Edward Said, Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Burhan Ghalioun opened up an ever-increasing liberal, democratic space in foreign and Arabic publications. Yes, some mixed their message of liberty with other “Arab” priorities: anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism. But their support of democracy was clear, and became more acute after the 9/11 attacks.

Courtesy By: The Opinion Page