Beijing – While international concern over China’s food and product safety has focused on exports to the United States and other countries, a report published Wednesday suggests that it is the Chinese people who have the most to fear.
A government watchdog said that more than 99 percent of the food exported to the United States met Chinese quality standards, slightly higher than the safety score of U.S. food imported into China. But the report said that nearly one-fifth of all goods sold domestically failed to meet standards.
The report by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine was the latest effort by the government to reassure foreign consumers and to demonstrate that a recent string of incidents involving tainted products, including potentially lethal toothpaste and pet food, was being blown out of proportion. China is worried about a consumer backlash that could threaten an industry that generates billions of dollars in sales each year.
“China attaches great importance to the quality and safety of Chinese exports,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a news conference Tuesday.
But while officials have said the international reaction has been overblown, an influential Chinese newspaper published an editorial Wednesday saying that Chinese food sometimes failed other countries’ quality standards because China’s own standards were too lax.
“It is becoming increasingly urgent to raise the food safety standards to international levels,” the official China Daily said.
The newspaper, citing unidentified sources, added that the government recently abolished hundreds of food safety standards that the industry had set for itself. The government move was part of a campaign to overhaul and raise the standards.
The latest government report on consumer safety seemed to reinforce a point the government has been trying to make in response to the tainted food scandals: The most unreliable products are made by relatively small, hard-to-monitor companies, while the large companies whose goods are most likely to be exported have significantly higher standards.
In a survey of 7,200 products from more than 6,000 companies, government researchers said they found that 93 percent of the products made by large companies met national standards, compared with only 73 percent of those that came from small companies.
The products surveyed during the first half of this year included food, everyday commodities and farm machinery, officials said.
