March 3, 2009
China to announce nationwide dairy safety standards later this year
Nationally unified dairy product safety standards will be announced in the second half of 2009, a senior official said Monday (Mar 2).
According to the recently passed Food Safety Law, the Ministry of Health will clean up current food standards to reduce loopholes and contradictions, said Deputy Health Minister Chen Xiaohong.
The ministry is working with the Ministry of Agriculture and Standardisation Administration to revise dairy product standards, following the melamine-tainted milk scandal last year that killed at least six infants and sickened tens of thousands others.
Chen said the whole process would end in the second half of 2009.
Chen said unified standards for pesticides, veterinary medicine residues and food additives are also urgently needed, and that the ministry is planning to form a national food safety standardisation committee.
China currently uses two sets of compulsory national food standards, which sometimes contradict each other and cause confusion among both supervisors and producers.
The unification of standards would improvement the Food Safety Law, but the process will be very difficult as it affects the interests of some government departments, according to Chen Junshi, senior researcher at the National Institute for Nutrition and Food Safety.
The researcher said China has about 200 million farmers and 500,000 food producers, which is the main reason why there have been so many food safety incidents.
Director of the Agriculture Ministry's agro-food safety supervision department Ma Aiguo admitted that it is indeed to difficult to monitor the scattered farming operations in China and they are facing great pressure to ensure the quality and safety of agricultural products.
Ensuring the quality and safety of agricultural products will remain a long-term and arduous task, Ma said.
