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Jun 20, 2007 2:28 am US/Eastern
China To Improve Food Safety Standards
BEIJING (AP) ―
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Chinese vendors wait by their stalls at a market in Beijing June 12, 2007.
Str/AFP/Getty Images
China, facing increased international pressure for exporting unsafe products, will update and strengthen enforcement of its food safety standards, the head of the country's regulatory body said Wednesday.
Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine was blamed for dog and cat deaths in North America. Other products turned away by U.S. inspectors include toxic monkfish, frozen eel and juice made with unsafe color additives, while Chinese-made toothpaste has been rejected by a handful of countries.
"China will speed up revisions to national and industry standards on farm produce and processed food products," Liu Pingjun, chief of the National Standardization Management Commission, said in a statement posted Wednesday on the Web site of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
Liu said China had 1,965 national food safety standards at the end of 2006, 634 of which were mandatory, but that "the standards were on average 12 years old."
He said the goal was to ensure that domestic standards complied with international ones and that none of them were more than 4-1/2 years old.
Liu did not say what was wrong with the current standards or how they differed from international ones.
Reports of food poisonings or tainted food are almost daily occurrences in China. In the latest food safety scare, a company was ordered to stop production after it was found to be repackaging the filling from two-year-old rice dumplings.
Officials in east China's Anhui province ordered a recall of all "zongzi" -- a traditional snack made of glutinous rice and other fillings usually wrapped in bamboo leaves -- made by the manufacturer, Wan Maomao Frozen Food Co. There were no reports of anyone falling ill from eating the dumplings.
Calls to the number listed for Wan Maomao Frozen Foods rang unanswered Tuesday.
Zongzi are traditionally eaten during the Dragon Boat festival each June, and last week the national quality inspection administration said 10 percent of rice dumplings made by 133 producers nationwide had failed tests because they contained excessive amounts of food additives.
The tests showed that the leaves contained high amounts of copper sulfate or copper chloride, normally used to make the leaves bright green.
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