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UN report calls on China to revamp its food safety system

China must modernize its food safety system, the UN said yesterday, arguing that an outdated and disjointed approach may have worsened a crisis over contaminated milk that killed four babies.

In a new report on food safety in China, the UN urged Beijing to adopt a “modern” food safety law and introduce other measures that would help build trust in the government’s ability to ensure the nation’s food was safe.

“The present system is managed by several laws and an old philosophy that government is responsible for everything,” Jorgen Schlundt, director of the WHO’s department of food safety, told journalists.

“We have to change that kind of philosophy because we need the food producers to be responsible for food safety,” he said.

The report was issued as China continued to deal with the fallout of a scandal in which the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been commonly mixed into milk to give it the appearance of higher protein levels.

Four babies died and at least 53,000 babies fell ill after drinking tainted milk powder.

Although at least one Chinese dairy firm knew of the scam for months, it did not immediately report it to local government officials, who in turn delayed passing on the news for nearly a month until after the Beijing Olympics.

“In this incident we see that an old-fashioned system contributed to the event,” Schlundt said of the milk scandal.

“This disjointed system with disjointed authority between different ministries and agencies had resulted in broken communication and may have prolonged the outbreak with a late response,” he said.

It called on China to set up a unified and enforceable system capable of ensuring product safety from farm to table, and which would highlight the responsibilities of producers to make safe food.

China needed to educate its companies to better understand the role they played in building market confidence both domestically and abroad, Schlundt said.
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