China's regulatory standards chief pledged yesterday to update and boost enforcement of food safety rules as the country faces intense international pressure for exporting unsafe products from toothpaste to pet food ingredients.
Chinese-made toothpaste has been rejected by countries from Latin America to Asia while wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine was blamed for dog and cat deaths in North America.
Other products turned away by US inspectors include toxic monkfish, frozen eel and juice made with unsafe color additives.
"China will speed up revisions to national and industry standards on farm produce and processed food products," Liu Pingjun (劉平均), chief of the National Standardization Management Commission, said in a statement posted yesterday on the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine's Web site.
Liu said China had 1,965 national food safety standards at the end of last year, 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 four-and-a-half years old.
Liu did not say what was wrong with the current standards.
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 zongzi (glutinous rice dumplings).
Anhui Province officials ordered a recall of all zongzi made by the manufacturer, Wan Maomao Frozen Food Co. There were no reports of anyone falling ill from eating the dumplings.
Last week the national quality inspection administration said 10 percent of zongzi made by 133 producers had failed tests because they contained excessive amounts of food additives. The tests showed that the banana leave wrappers contained high amounts of copper sulfate or copper chloride, used to make the leaves bright green.
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