China ordered 69 categories of products to be bar-coded at
factories starting Monday, Dec. 3, in its latest effort to improve
product safety.
The products range from electronics, electrical wires and
agricultural production materials to food and cosmetics.
The action, announced jointly by the General Administration of
Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the Ministry of
Commerce and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, is
part of a program by regulators to establish a quality monitoring
and tracking system.
Factories technically have a transitional six-month period to
use up old packaging but are actually being ordered to join the new
system sooner.
The monitoring system, created in 2005, allows consumers to
check bar-code data by phone, text message, internet, and
information terminals.
The government introduced recall systems for unsafe food and
toys on Aug. 31 and launched a four-month safety inspection
nationwide starting in late August after several product-safety
scares.
The safety incidents included parasite-infested snails, ducks
and hens that were fed cancer-causing Sudan Red dye to make their
egg yolks red and pet food containing melamine-tainted wheat
protein that killed scores of dogs and cats in the United
States.
(Xinhua News Agency December 4, 2007)
