Beijing will start a daily report mechanism on food safety during the "Good Luck Beijing" International tournaments officially set to kick off on Aug. 8, a test run for the food safety monitoring system designed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

 

Sources with the Beijing Municipal Food Safety Office said that Beijing is going to share this system with all other cities hosting the Olympic games, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenyang, Qingdao, and Qinhuangdao.

 

The system will monitor 10 types of information including production, processing, sales, and cooking of food. While the 12 tournaments are held in August, food safety authorities will make daily public reports on whether or not there is an emergency.

 

No such daily reports have ever been made in Beijing.

 

In preparation for the 17-day event slated to open next August, the Beijing government has started to file food and drink suppliers for the Olympics. The first batch of 20 enterprises providing food raw materials has been confirmed and is under watch.

 

Food safety authorities have inspected 6,800 samples of 345 varieties of foodstuff so far. The test reports will be loaded into the monitoring system for reference. The municipality has also constituted a special plan to standardize the supervision of Olympics food and drink supply centers and alternative supply centers, which covers production, processing, distribution and the safety of packaging and production raw materials.

 

Between August and next May, a total of 39 international tournaments will be held, mostly in Beijing as a warm-up to the 2008 Olympics.

 

(Xinhua News Agency July 13, 2007)