U.S. opens food safety office in Beijing
Amid recurring Chinese product safety scares, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday opened an inspection office in Beijing that officials said would help China export safer products to America and the world.
The new FDA field office, one of three to be opened in China, is the first outside the U.S. and comes during a nadir in U.S. consumer confidence in Chinese-made products after reports of counterfeit drugs, melamine-laced milk and toys covered in potentially lethal lead paint.
The U.S. hopes to work with China as part of a global product safety strategy that would eventually involve opening similar inspection offices in India, South America, Europe and the Middle East, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told a gathering of Chinese manufacturers.
“This is not about China and the U.S.,” Leavitt said. “This is about a response to a large shift in global trading patterns. We have to invent solutions to problems that didn’t exist 15 years ago.”
Some food safety experts, however, questioned the scope of foreign oversight in China, doubting whether factory owners would allow outsiders into their plants.
China’s public response to the new product-inspection strategy was generally positive, with officials announcing that they planned to open their own product quality-control office in the U.S.
Leavitt said he had heard about China’s plans to send inspectors to the U.S. but didn’t know what their function would be.
Food experts say access to the 450,000 food-production facilities in China could prove harder than U.S. officials realize. U.S. staffing in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will total between nine and 12 people, U.S. officials say.
“To access rural individual producers to check product quality could be a little bit difficult,” said He Jiguo, a professor at China Agriculture University’s School of Food Science.
“China’s agriculture production processes are very dispersed and composed of a number of little factories and rural families, which is quite different from the big farm production in the U.S., where it is easier to facilitate strict management,” He said.
But on Wednesday, U.S. officials seemed confident that they were making a decisive move at a crucial time in world food trade.
During a news conference, Leavitt and FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach stressed China’s role as a major exporter of products to the U.S.
Last year, the U.S. imported $321.5 billion in Chinese products, establishing China as America’s second-largest trading partner after Canada.
Overall, the U.S. imported nearly $2 trillion worth of goods, including 15% of the food Americans eat. Those imports came from 200,000 foreign manufacturers in 150 countries, Leavitt said.
“My responsibility is the health and well-being of the American people as we watch these historic changes in the patterns of commerce,” he said.
Von Eschenbach said that U.S. officials would work with Chinese regulatory agencies to establish better safety checks. He also said that when the new system is up and running, all U.S. imports -- from China and elsewhere -- will require testing and certification by independent laboratories.
The third-party certifiers will include private labs or Chinese government agencies working under the supervision and oversight of the FDA, Von Eschenbach said.
“We’re not here to superimpose our system on China,” he said. “We’re here to be partners and collaborators, and offer our expertise as they request it. But consumers want to know the products they use are safe and are subjected to rigorous scrutiny. This will help ensure that.”
His comments came as Chinese officials urged the U.S. to lift new restrictions on imported foods from China, insisting that Beijing has taken effective measures to improve food safety standards since the recent tainted-milk scandal.
China has recently been beset by a series of product safety scares that include melamine-tainted dairy products that killed four infants and sickened tens of thousands of people. One high-ranking Chinese official who oversaw food quality resigned after the milk scandal.
In 2007, a former chief of China’s food and drug agency was put to death for accepting bribes to allow a deadly antibiotic to pass inspection.
One U.S.-based food manufacturer in China called the announcement of the FDA’s new Beijing office a good first step toward necessary collaboration between the countries.
“For both China and U.S. officials to open offices in each other’s countries will at least bring more dialogue,” said James Rice, head of the China operations of Tyson Foods Inc. “These FDA officials here are not going to inspect everything coming from China into the U.S. But it’s better than nothing.”
--
