China is displaying its beefed up food quality control initiatives at the Fifth China Agricultural Trade Fair.

 

Bar-coded foodstuffs now allow food inspectors and shopkeepers to instantly read an item's provenance, with the aid of a simple scanner which can then display the information on a computer screen.

 

Information stored on a product, for instance a cucumber, includes the producer's name, how the cucumber was grown, when it was picked and how it was transported.

 

During the past couple of years the reputation of Chinese foodstuffs has suffered in the wake of several food scares which have seen products hastily removed from the shelves of stores across the globe.

 

Scares that hit the headlines ranged from parasite-infested snails, ducks and hens that were fed cancer-causing Sudan Red dye to make their egg yolks red, to pet food made of melamine-tainted wheat protein that killed scores of dogs and cats in the United States.

 

In a further bid to reassure the public, the government also introduced recall systems for unsafe food on August 31 and launched four-month-long safety inspections nationwide starting from late August, including clamp-downs on banned toxic chemicals in farm products and carcinogenic malachite green and nitrofurans in aquatic products.

 

All the efforts have started to pay off as the country's food quality increases.

 

Quality of China's agricultural products is now higher than before, and 99 percent of its food exports to the United States, the European Union and Japan met quality standards over the last four years, the Minister of Agriculture Sun Zhengcai said.

 

The average acceptance rate regarding pesticide residues in vegetables was 93.6 percent in the first half of 2007; for clenbuterol hydrochloride contamination and sulfa drug residues in livestock products was 98.8 percent and 99.0 percent respectively, according to Sun.

 

The rising food quality has helped to gain customers' confidence and secure more overseas orders.

 

Overseas purchase hit 4.4 billion yuan, accounting for 54 percent of the 8.1 billion yuan (1.1 billion U.S. dollars) worth of deals sealed on Sunday at the China Agricultural Trade Fair, held in Jinan the capital of the eastern province of Shandong, according to the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA).

 

The fair, hosted by the MOA and with the theme of "Green Agriculture, Harmonious Countryside", has attracted more than 1,600 food makers and 300 purchasers from home and abroad.

 

"We increase our purchases in China by around 15 percent annually, with a noticeable rise in food quality," Van Liu, a merchandiser assistant of Metro Group Buying HK Ltd., told Xinhua.

 

"We care more about quality than we do about keeping prices low because now customers are becoming more safety conscious," Liu added.

 

Lu Jinyang, a sales manager at Shandong Green Foodstuff Co., said the sales of his company grow at around 30 percent annually as they export more green food products to countries including Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United States.

 

(Xinhua News Agency October 16, 2007)