China needs to "recognize" its food safety situation and take
effective measures to safeguard imports and exports, a top official
said.
"At present, food safety issues have attracted wide attention
globally. Our country has also attached great importance to these
issues," Wei Chuanzhong, deputy director of the General
Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine,
said in a statement posted on the administration's website
yesterday.
The statement said Wei, on a recent tour of Hubei Province in
central China and Shanghai, China's business center, had ordered
local inspection bodies to boost their work.
That included "building up enterprises' administrative levels
and management systems" and speeding "up reforms on inspections and
quarantines".
In a related development, the Ministry of Agriculture said
yesterday Chinese farm products are getting safer, citing tests of
fruit, vegetables, meat and fish in major cities that showed more
than 95 percent of products were up to standard.
The ministry said on its website (www.agri.gov.cn) that all meat
tested in 25 major cities, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and
Shenyang, met safe standards.
The quality eligibility rate of vegetables in 37 major cities
was 94.3 percent in terms of pesticide residues, the "highest rate
in recent years", it said.
But there were still a few problems. Malachite green, a
cancer-causing chemical used by fish farmers to kill parasites, was
found in some samples, as were nitrofurans, an antibiotic also
linked to cancer, the ministry said.
The ministry this year will strengthen quality and safety
controls over farm products and push for standardization in the
farm sector.
The State Council has unveiled plans for a food safety
information monitoring network covering 90 percent of the
country.
Food safety still faces enormous problems in China. Recently, a
company in central Anhui Province was caught repackaging for sale
more than 2 tons of rice dumplings, two years after their
production date.
(Xinhua News Agency June 20, 2007)