中美加强合作 关注食品安全

China recently set up a national-level technical center that will provide evaluation reports on food safety. The creation of such a center is seen as an important step towards comprehensively tackling an issue which has led to increasing public attention being focused upon food-borne incidents, such as the illegal use of lean meat powder.

Luo Yunbo, Dean of the College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering at China Agricultural University, believes that the Chinese government has adopted more rigid standards in their efforts to ensure that their domestic food supply is safe. These standards include the implementation of strict criteria on food imports from the United States.

"All types of lean meat powder, such as Clenbuterol and Ractopamine, are banned in China. However, the United States approves the application of Ractopamine. So the US never planned to have negotiations with China on what they believed to be a "technical barrier" in the import of their meat products. This example leads us to draw a conclusion that China actually observes more rigid supervision standards in certain aspects than the United States."

However, due to a lack of professional knowledge, ordinary Chinese people often panic over made-in-China food products when they hear about food safety incidents, such as the 2008 Chinese milk scandal that began with revelations of contamination of Sanlu milk products. From that point onwards, some Chinese citizens have preferred to consume foreign brand products over domestically made produce.

Luo Yunbo admitted food insecurities do exist in China, but he also said that the country has only detected a very low rate of occurrence in terms of food contamination, and that the fundamental safety of food consumption is guaranteed.

The expert added that Chinese people may be unaware that insecurity related to food is also present in other countries, such as the US, citing the incident of tainted cantaloupes as evidence for his claim.

To date, 28 people have died in an outbreak of listeria traced to Colorado cantaloupes. As a result of the epidemic, a pregnant woman had to undergo an abortion after eating tainted melon. The food-borne outbreak is the deadliest on US soil for more than a decade.

The incident took place after a new Food Safety Modernization Act was signed into law by US President Barack Obama in January.

According to four senior officials with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which leads the implementation of the new law, the United States has their own challenges to address. It also needs effective collaboration with their partners like China, since China is an important food supplier to the States.

At a press briefing held recently in Beijing by officials taking part in a working visit to China, Michael Taylor, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods, highlighted that a better understanding of the new law is important for Chinese exporters. Creating such an understanding is one of the main reasons as to why these officials are in the country.

"Our dialogue is just getting started about the new law, because we've not yet published the proposed regulations that would implement the law. We've given our counterparts a good understanding of generally what those regulations will look like and then we expect, when we publish those proposals beginning after the first of the new year, we expect some sort of comments given from the Chinese perspective and substance of comments on the rules and what the rules should be."

The FDA is a US domestic consumer protection agency that had previously never sent staff overseas until three years ago when officials started to work on food importation. Here in China, the FDA has 13 professionals including eight US nationals and five Chinese nationals. They have bases in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou respectively in order to work closely with their Chinese colleagues as they strive for a better future for consumers in both countries.

For CRI, I'm Li Ningjing.