Posted on 08/18/2007 6:47:30 AM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
(BEIJING) - China sought to shore up its battered reputation as a global exporter Friday, releasing a policy paper that touted its past food safety record. The paper also noted the current campaign to crack down on bad food-processing practices.
The policy paper, issued by the information office of the Cabinet, the State Council, lists a series of achievements and planned measures, from establishing a national food recall system to increasing exchanges with quality officials in other countries.
Though the 39-page document broke little ground, its release underscores the communist leadership’s drive to salvage the “Made in China” label, which has been tarnished by months of quality scares.
“China is a responsible country,” said the State Council Information Office paper titled “The Situation of China’s Food Safety Quality.”
“The Chinese government has stepped up active measures in enhancing food quality and ensuring food safety to protect the interests of consumers in both China and other countries,” it said.
Chinese exports have been under fire, especially in the U.S., China’s most important export market. Regulators have turned up tainted pet food ingredients, adulterated seafood and toothpaste with potentially dangerous chemicals and drugs. Mattel Inc., the world’s biggest toy company, this week issued its second recall of Chinese-made toys this summer because of lead-tainted paint and tiny magnets that could be swallowed by children.
While initially reluctant to acknowledge there was a problem, authorities have since thrown themselves into the campaign to protect export industries and bolster the country’s image for next year’s Olympic Games in Beijing.
“China has not handled the crisis well so far, but its statements and actions show a desire for improvement,” said Gene Grabowski, a senior vice president at a Washington-based public relations firm, Levick Strategic Communications, which works with large food and consumer goods companies.
In recent weeks, government leaders and agencies have almost daily announced stringent measures to rectify the situation.
According to the policy paper, China exported 24 million tons of food last year to more than 200 countries, 13 percent more than in the same period in 2005. Seafood, vegetables and canned goods are among the most popular products, and Japan, the U.S. and South Korea are the three biggest importers, it said.
“For years, over 99 per cent of China’s food exports have been up to standard,” the paper said.
maybe they should execute some more high level bureaucrats!
/s
I find it utterly astounding that we import that much food from China.
We’re sitting on one of the most prolific agricultural areas of the world, with the highest tech equipment, medicinals, and farming knowledge, and we gotta bring over stuff from them?
Makes no sense to me.
What they promise to only use the best lead paint on my daughter’s toys? No sale!
That's because we're exporting our food to other countries.
All in the name of global economy. Gotta feed the beast.
This is how the Chinese will shape up. They are unethical, but they are also smart, and their greed outweighs their ethics. If customers demand high quality and safety, which we are as they move up the product ladder.. The Chinese will spend the big bucks to put in safety and quality.
And they don’t have much choice now, because a lot of other nations are coming up behind them in the mass produced cheap crap. Chinese wages are low by our standards but rising by 12% a year in real terms, and its pricing them out of the low end crap. Countries like the Southeast
Asians are stepping up there, sometimes with Chinese owned factories.
I don’t get it either, I thought for sure food would be one of comparative advantages in the new global economy. For all those strong reasons you gave. Our government is even ultra pro farming, unlike other industries where it tries to kill off our best companies.
My only guess is we decided to burn so much of our crop to make ethanol, that its pricing us out of some of the lower end food stuffs.
And reporters, can’t forget those pesky reporters.
China Industries International
their new corporate logo...
BUMP
Good luck with that, China. I, for one, am thankful you showed your true colors.
Actually it is up to us consumers to check recalls.
Since the news only has been playing up China, we have to check these other things that are recalled.
http://www.recalls.gov/recent.html
But still BOYCOTT CHINA!!!!!
Sure it makes sense; we import food, just like Iran imports gasoline. We also import illegal ailens to do the agricultural jobs, but if we get our food from China, what exactly are the illegals doing in those farm fields?
China Tries to Repair Its Reputation as an Exporter..
what reputation???...they export more shi-ite than the lib/dems at the the daily kos convention!!!!!
I have a fair-sized collection of bent screwdrivers from China from years past. But, this week I bought two blister pacs of self-tapping sheet metal screws identical except one was made in Taiwan and the other in China. If anything, the Chinese product actually looked better than the Taiwanese. Maybe one has to have a special attitude to care or notice how sheet metal self-tapping screws look.
“China Tries to Repair Its Reputation as an Exporter”
Right.
Next, they’ll be grinding up political prisoners and selling it to us as “grade-A beef.” The inhuman, commie bastards. They can keep their slave-labor produced, substandard crap.
When the scares started - pet food, tires, lead paint in toys, sewage-raised seafood, etc., we breathed a sigh of relief in our home. The diligent boycott of Chinese goods --including processed foods that might hide Chinese ingredients - has really paid off for our household. I say that sadly, not gleefully. I wish lead paint in the brain of NO child. Inhumane.
I read somewhere that American garlic costs $1.00 a pound. Chinese garlic is $0.50 a pound. That's a pretty big difference. Grocery stores owners aren't dummies. If Americans are willing to pay up for US garlic, grocery stores will stock it. It seems like so little money, but the problem is that it really adds up. A dollar here, a dollar there, and the typical $600 food bill for a family of four becomes $1200.
Unions are a wonderful thing - for people who are union workers. Everyone else pays for the "wonderful thing" union workers have in the form of higher prices. The trick with unions is that union workers only benefit if most other people aren't union workers - i.e. the great unwashed are on the outside (of the union) looking in. If everyone gets union wages, prices everywhere are uniformly higher, meaning nobody benefits from a higher living standard.
Let the Communists figure out how to build a real economy in their own country first without sucking ours dry with garbage that undercuts people playing by the rules here.
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