Food and drug safety supervision faces "challenges", but the
situation is improving thanks to enhanced consumer awareness and
quality control, regulators said yesterday.
At?a rare press conference that brought together major
watchdogs of the country's food and drug quality following an
avalanche of media criticism over safety and fraud, officials
frankly acknowledged the problems they encounter and outlined steps
to tackle them.
"As a developing country, China's food and drug supervision work
began late with weak foundations. Therefore, the situation is not
very satisfactory," said Yan Jiangying, a spokeswoman for the State
Food and Drug Administration (SFDA).
Corruption cases, such as those involving the former SFDA chief
Zheng Xiaoyu - who was executed yesterday - have "brought great
shame upon us", she said (see story below).
"We should draw lessons from these cases and sincerely protect
public food and drug safety," Yan said.
The government is implementing a five-year plan to tighten the
supervision of food and drug products, upgrade standards and vastly
reduce the number of incidents caused by defective food or faulty
medicines by 2010, she told the news conference held by the State
Council Information Office in Beijing.
Wu Jianping of the General Administration of Quality
Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, offered reasons for
optimism.
"Our food market access system has been so implemented that
supermarkets like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Hualian do not stock food
items without a Quality Safe (QS) mark," the chief of the agency's
food production and supervision department said.
"When housewives shop in a supermarket, they make sure the goods
are labeled with a QS mark; if not, they don't buy them."
Wu said "survival of the best" is gaining momentum in China.
"Scrupulous" food businesses, including those producing China's
top brands, are typically seeing their sales increase handsomely
while those blacklisted could hardly survive, Wu said.
The QS mark, which made its debut in 2003, indicates a product
has passed the market access scrutiny of the quality supervision
agency. All the processed food produced in China will eventually
have to be labeled with such a sign, Wu said without specifying a
timetable.
Right now, 525 products in 28 categories including wheat flour,
vinegar, sauce, cooking oil and rice are required to bear the mark
to enter the market.
To weed out shoddy products, the agency is also striving to
clean up small food businesses, preventing their products from
being sold in supermarkets.
China has nearly 450,000 food makers, of which roughly four in
every five employ fewer than 10 people. The number of such firms
will be cut by half by the end of 2009, Wu said.
Lin Wei, deputy head of the quality inspection agency's import
and export food safety bureau, said recent food safety problems,
including the scare over pet food exported to North America, are
isolated cases caused by illegal firms.
The agency has published a blacklist of companies that breached
safety rules and regulations on its website (www.aqsiq.gov.cn), and
stripped them of their export rights.
(China Daily July 11, 2007)