Monitoring food safety, a shared responsibility

By Lin Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-17 07:59

Food is the most direct and important consumption item of human beings. But today, the use of new materials, booming global trade and pollution are posing new threats to food safety around the globe.

As a responsible country, China is making the greatest efforts to clean our own backyard, but we also believe food safety is a shared problem and responsibility of all countries.

In particular, we consider the cooperation between quality control departments from China and Japan important, and we are glad to see that such a relation has been intensified in the past year.

We hope further efforts can be made in the following fields:

Firstly, to establish a regular cooperation mechanism between the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) of China and Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Under the mechanism, both countries should:

1. Inform in a timely manner food safety standards and testing requirements to each other, and provide personnel training and technical assistance.

2. Send quality control officers to oversee relevant food-processing procedures in the other country. The other country should offer help and facilitate such work to the extent possible.

3. Rapidly inform the other country in case of any food safety emergencies, and take measures to prevent the situation from escalating.

4. Release scientific and accurate information to the public and avoid causing panic.

5. Appoint designated liaison officers to ensure smooth and accurate information exchange.

6. Hold teleconferences or meetings regularly to exchange information and discuss food safety issues of mutual concern.

Secondly, we believe international food safety issues should be settled through consultation. It's important to expose food safety incidents promptly to protect the rights and interests of consumers, but we disagree with biased, incomplete media reports and we believe such reports should be clarified upfront.

China is a responsible country, and we have been keen in improving domestic food safety levels during the past few years. So far, China has established an effective coordination mechanism among various ministries involved in food safety supervision, and we have made a series of relevant laws and regulations. We are also losing no time in making and upgrading food safety standards. So far, China has more than 1,800 national standards relating to food safety, including 634 compulsory ones.

In addition, China has set up a sound and standard system in the authentication and authorization of food products.

Last year, the Chinese government also took six major measures to improve product quality and food safety levels, including the launch of an unprecedented rectification campaign.

China has also tightened its control on the safety of outbound food products. Our supervision starts with the farmland, and goes through the entire transportation and processing procedures. We require all export-designated farms and factories to be registered at local quality control authorities and impose very strict checks on their products. We have also introduced the "blacklist" to warn consumers and importers of companies with bad records.

According to figures from Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the approval rate of Chinese food products to Japan were respectively 99.4 percent, 99.56 percent, 99.42 percent and 99.81 percent from 2004 to 2007, higher than the rate of food products from other countries.

The author is deputy director of Bureau of Import and Export Food Safety of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of China