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China Announces Food Safety Rules |
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Posted by Truth About Trade & Technology
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Thursday, 20 November 2008 |
The New York Times
November 21, 2008
BEIJING — The Chinese government, struggling to contain the fallout from a scandal over contaminated milk and eggs, announced a wide range of food safety measures on Thursday aimed at reining in abuses in the dairy industry.
The State Council, China’s cabinet, issued several new rules that it says will govern all aspects of the industry, from cow breeding and animal feed to the packaging and sale of milk.
Since September, when Chinese-made milk powder was found to be adulterated with the industrial chemical melamine, at least four infants who drank milk formula have died and more than 50,000 children have fallen ill. On Thursday, China’s Health Ministry said more than 1,000 infants were still hospitalized with kidney damage, Reuters reported.
“The crisis has put China’s dairy industry in peril and exposed major problems existing in the quality control and supervision of the industry,” an official with China’s National Development and Reform Commission said in a posting on the agency’s Web site.
The government said that it would issue new laws and standards by next October, and that by 2011, “the goal is to have well-bred cows and a mass-producing dairy industry,” according to Xinhua, the official news agency.
This is not the first time regulators have vowed to clean up China’s fast-growing agriculture industry. A similar cry erupted last year when it was discovered that melamine-tainted pet food ingredients from China had sickened cats and dogs in the United States. China banned melamine as an animal feed additive.
But this month, China disclosed that scores of feed manufacturers and chemical suppliers were still selling the substance.
Melamine is high in nitrogen, which can register as protein in many tests. In higher concentrations it can cause kidney stones or kidney failure.
On Wednesday, the United States Food and Drug Administration opened a bureau in Beijing.
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