Vegetable safety to be ensured during 2008
Given Red China’s iron-handed approach to internal problems, you’d better believe the bok choi’s going to be clean as a whistle come 2008 — in spite of the fact that Chairman Mao praised human waste as a taste-enhancing fertilizer. China is attempting to use the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1259 poor product quality, internal repression and international belligerance. The following article, from the official Chinese mouthpiece, lays out the party line for foreign consumption. Internal communiques are surely much more to the point.
(Xinhua) The athletes and tourists from all over the world don’t have to worry at all about vegetable safety during the Beijing Olympic Games, said an official with the Supervision and Testing Center for Vegetable Quality of Ministry of Agriculture (MOA).
Liu Su, vice director of the center said on Thursday that his center would dedicate full efforts to cooperate with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games (BOCOG) in order to ensure vegetable safety during the sports event in 2008.
According to Liu, the center, which came into operation in January of 1999 after jointly certified by the Ministry of Agriculture and the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (GAQSIQ), now has more than 40 types of advanced testing and analyzing appliances including gas chromatographer, automatic nitrogen determinig instrument, plasma emission spectrometer, ultraviolet-visible spectrometer, for testing nutritious qualities, mineral elements, microbes and various pollutants such as pesticide residues and heavy metal contents of vegetables.
Liu said the testing of vegetables at the center would strictly follow China’s national standards for safe vegetables, 80 per cent of which are similar to international standards.
Liu said, the MOA introduced a regular surveillance system for supervising agricultural product quality and safety in 2001. 125,000 samples of vegetables, animal products and aquatic products have been tested, and 1.1 million effective data have been collected.
At the present, the MOA regular surveillance covers pesticide residues in vegetables in 37 cities, clenbuterol contamination in animal products as well as diethylstilbestrol contamination in chicken in 36 cities, and chloramphenicol residues in aquatic products in 22 cities. According to the surveillance findings in this April, the compliance rate of vegetable samples tested for the pesticide residue in 37 cities was over 94 per cent, live pig samples tested for the clenbuterol contamination 98.9 per cent, the aquatic product samples tested for the chloramphenicol residues 99.4 per cent.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/2008/2007-08/03/content_5447963.htm
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