Food safety beset by challenges
[ 2007-07-11 11:50 ]
Food and drug safety supervision
faces "challenges", but the situation is improving thanks to enhanced consumer
awareness and quality control, regulators said yesterday.
In 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.
"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 at 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 in 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 07/11/2007 page 1)
（英語點津 Linda 編輯）
About the broadcaster:
Bernice Chan is a foreign expert at China Daily Website. Originally from
Vancouver, Canada, Bernice has written for newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong
and most recently worked as a broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, producing current affairs shows and
documentaries. |
