China will continue to adopt substantial measures to ensure safety of farm products, protecting the health of Chinese residents and making Chinese goods more competitive on the world market, said an high ranking official with the Ministry of Agriculture Wednesday.

Du Qinglin, Minister of Agriculture, said at a seminar on farm products safety that China will encourage the standardized production of farm products. They will also control the quality of the whole procedure country-wide.

China will also advocate producing safe agricultural products and green food, while encouraging the production of organic food in regions with suitable natural conditions.

"Enhancing quality and safety for agro-products will not only be an important channel for raising agricultural competitiveness and increasing farmers' income, but also the basic requirements required for people's health," said Du.

With the growth of industrialization, fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals are used more and more in agriculture. This has caused experts to worry about pollution of farm products. In the past years, China's farm products were sometimes blocked outside Western markets, partly because of the "technical barrier" of some countries, partly because of the unstable quality of China's farm products, said agricultural experts.

To solve the problem, the Ministry of Agriculture launched "Agri-Food Safety Program" in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Shenzhen in 2001, and later extended to the whole country.

Progress has been made in this area. Regular testing of chemical residue for agro-product from 37 large and medium-size cities April this year shows that 96.4 percent of farm products reached safety standard.

To set unified standards to farm products, China has also introduced a certification system in the mid 1980s.

So far, a complete accreditation system has been set up, covering three levels of farm products: safe farm products, green food, and organic food.

At the beginning of this year, the central government has decided to allocate special funds to encourage farm products companies to obtain certification and accreditation, especially internationally-acknowledged accreditation.

(Xinhua News Agency October 14, 2004)