March 19, 2007

Shanghai to strengthen food safety by assigning producers to distributors

As more than half of Shanghai's agric-products are from other provinces, the city would now assign fixed partnerships to link producers outside the province to local distributors to ensure food safety, a meeting of Shanghai's Market Inspection Committee held last week concluded.

Shanghai consumes massive amounts of food daily. The city consumes about 20,000 tonnes of agric-products a day, including 300,000 poultry and 30,000 pigs. Of this amount, 80 percent of live pigs, 75 percent of poultry and 50 percent of vegetables are from other provinces.

Shanghai's plan would link producers to assigned distributors to improve food safety at the production, processing and transportation stage. For example, slaughterhouses would coordinate their slaughter with hog farms from outside the province and large-scale wholesale centres would co-ordinate with large-scale aqua-farms from outside Shanghai. This would ensure that food safety is fully traceable and ensures compliance right from the source.

Shanghai intends to further improve on co-operation between its food safety departments and their counterparts outside the province to conduct more in-depth inspections at the producer level to ensure a safe food supply for its residents. 

Shanghai last year sparked a widespread ban of turbot from Shandong last year when it announced it found excessive amounts of carcinogenic antibiotics in the fish.

Hundreds in Shanghai were also hospitalised last year after eating pork from Zhejiang province believed to be tainted by clenbuterol, a banned drug used to help build muscles.