Japanese government and business leaders held an emergency meeting yesterday to assess the safety of imported goods amid growing global concern about Chinese products.
"People are increasingly interested in the safety of imported goods," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki told reporters in announcing the meeting.
"The government and the private sector will join hands [to ensure the] safety of [imported] foodstuffs, commodities for daily use, pharmaceuticals and other goods," he said.
The one-day meeting includes officials from the health, farm, trade and foreign ministries, as well as representatives from a private-sector frozen food association, department stores and other groups.
Shiozaki did not name any country but said it would be "fully possible that we will have talks with a country if there seems to be a problem."
Japan is heavily reliant on food imports and counts China as its second-largest supplier after the US. China exported US$8.2 billion worth of food to Japan in the last fiscal year to March, accounting for 17 percent of Japan's imports, finance ministry figures show.
Bad food and medicines from China have often made headlines in Japan, which prides itself on very strict health codes.
In 2002, a Japanese firm recalled and halted sales of Chinese diet pills upon orders from a local government after the drugs were held responsible for four deaths and more than 400 injuries.
No deaths or injuries from Chinese products have been reported in Japan in the latest international round of scares, but the topic is one of the hottest in the Japanese media after toothpaste and other goods were recalled.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (
The Chinese government said yesterday it had shut down several companies at the heart of food and drug safety scares.
Li Changjiang (李長江), head of the General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said officials were focusing on stricter market access requirements for companies, conducting random checks, and beefing up product testing.
But he stressed that China was not the only one with problems, citing comments by WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) this week that the agency receives about 200 reports of food safety problems every month from its 193 member states.
"This shows that food safety is not an issue of a particular country or region," Li said at a news conference.
In a statement released yesterday, Li's administration said it had pulled the business license of Taixing Glycerin Factory, which has been accused of exporting diethylene glycol (DEG) and fraudulently passing it off as 99.5 percent pure glycerin. The "TD glycerin" mix of 15 percent DEG and other substances eventually ended up in Panamanian medicines that killed at least 51 people.
The statement also detailed punishments imposed on Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co -- the two companies linked to melamine-tainted wheat gluten blamed for the deaths of dozens of dogs and cats in North America.
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