The Chinese government is reassessing the way in which it
supervises food safety in order to improve the efficiency of the
current system, a senior quality control official said on
Friday.
Li Changjiang, minister in charge of the General Administration
of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), said
that various government departments are responsible for food safety
in China. The government is reassessing the current supervision
mechanism, he said, adding new measures will be taken to enhance
supervision after sufficient investigations and studies are
made.
The existing food supervision system involves at least five
central government departments - AQSIQ, the State Administration
for Industry and Commerce, the Ministry of Agriculture, the
Ministry of Health and the State Food and Drug Administration -
which are responsible for supervising farming, production and
processing, and distribution and selling.
New laws should be made to facilitate cooperation among
different government agencies in order to change the overlapping
food supervision system, Vice Health Minister Wang Longde said
earlier this month.
Li said China was endeavoring to tackle its food safety problem
in a comprehensive way.
"To ensure the quality of food exports, the Chinese government
has set up a monitoring system that covers plantations, breeding
farms and production bases," said Li. "Only products that pass
strict quarantine inspection are allowed to be exported."
With the United States only running random checks on imports at
all its ports, AQSIQ was exchanging views with the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration in the hope of ensuring food safety on the
basis of effective supervision by each side, said Li.
"Food safety is not an issue of a certain nation, but a global
issue," said Li, adding that China had established cooperation on
product safety mechanisms with a lot of countries and regions,
including the European Union, the U.S., Japan and the Republic of
Korea.
In the first half of the year, more than 99 percent of the
Chinese foods exported to the U.S., the EU and Japan were up to
standard. "But we do have a number of problems in food safety as a
lot of small manufacturers run in poor production conditions, with
unstable product quality," said Li.
The government would strengthen monitoring of small workshops,
which were widely scattered and had a 10-percent market share, and
ordered shutdown of those producing substandard and fake food, said
Li.
The quality control official, who blasted foreign media for
exaggerating food safety problems earlier this week, also said he
"welcomes scrutiny from the media" as the government told officials
to listen to media suggestions, which was believed to be helpful
for the government to improve its work.
The government pays great attention to addressing flaws in
product quality, especially the quality of food products, said
Li.
China has long had the tradition of taking samples of staple
goods and products concerning health and environmental protection
for examination and announcing the results to the public.
(Xinhua News Agency July 21, 2007)