China | China And U.S. Sign Agreement On Food Safety Amid Rising Inflation An...
China
China And U.S. Sign Agreement On Food Safety Amid Rising Inflation And Pork Prices
The United States and China inked an agreement on food safety in Beijing on Dec. 11, signaling a cooling of the trade friction which has affected exports of U.S. pork and poultry to China this summer and fall. China also notified the U.S. government that it has restored pork import eligibility to six of the eleven U.S. plants that were de-listed due to Ractopamine detections. Pork shipped from the re-listed plants must comply with China’s zero tolerance standard for Ractopamine.
The memorandum of agreement (MOA) establishes certification requirements for an initial list of Chinese food and feed products including preserved foods and vegetables (e.g. canned mushrooms), pet foods, food and feed ingredients (e.g. wheat gluten and rice protein) and farm-raised fish. The MOA calls for the Chinese quarantine and certification agency (AQSIQ) to pre-register establishments that wish to ship any of these products to the United States. AQSIQ must also certify each shipment from approved establishments and notify the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of pending shipments using a unique certification ID number. AQSIQ will also monitor the safety of shipments through testing. The agreement also contains “early warning” mechanisms for problem shipments, and provides access to Chinese plants by HHS and Food and Drug Agency inspectors.
The MOA was signed as part of Tuesday’s Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) bilateral discussions, which precede the third round of biannual Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) trade talks in Beijing, scheduled to begin today. The signatories of the agreement were the HHS and AQSIQ.
The China food safety issue emerged this summer from relative obscurity to top the A list of bilateral issues, which also include intellectual property rights and the Chinese Yuan-U.S. dollar exchange rate. Despite U.S. concern over the safety of Chinese food imports, bilateral agricultural trade is expanding rapidly. The value of U.S. imports of Chinese agricultural, forestry and aquaculture products for the first nine months of 2007 was up 13 percent over the record pace of last year. U.S. imports of consumer-oriented Chinese agricultural products were up 44 percent over last year’s level. U.S. exports of agricultural, forestry and aquaculture products during the first nine months of 2007 reached $5.98 billion, up 8.3 percent compared to the same period in 2006.
China is striving to shed its image as a source of shoddy goods and unsafe food. On Halloween, China approved its first comprehensive national law on food safety, the culmination of a decade-long effort to link together a patchwork of food safety regulations that stretched across a number of government institutions and ministries. Last Monday, Guangdong announced it had become the first province to detail legal sanctions which will be applied to substandard food factories, food retailers and foodservice operations. And in an uncharacteristic public statement by a top Chinese official, Vice Premier Wu Yi, China’s top food and product safety watchdog, spelled out China’s efforts to improve food and product safety on yesterday’s Asian Wall Street Journal editorial page.
In addition to new laws, Chinese quality and hygiene inspection squads have fanned out across the country this fall in an effort to shutter illegal and unhygienic food operations. According to official Chinese sources, the Ministry of Health has closed 41,000 restaurants since September, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the agency regulating businesses, has closed 2,800 small rural food plants, 6,396 illegal pork slaughter facilities, and 1,112 of the more than 23,500 legal slaughter establishments.
Although USMEF does not believe China’s food safety crackdown is significantly impacting the food marketing chain, the campaign comes at a time of surging food prices. China announced Tuesday that inflation spiked to an 11-year high of 6.9 percent in November due to rising food prices. According to USMEF-Beijing, after drifting slightly downward in late summer, pork prices in the capital climbed over the last eight weeks to a historic high. Yesterday, China’s central government issued an edict to authorities in 36 major cities to keep 10-day reserves of cooking oil and other foodstuffs, in order to ameliorate further price rises and discourage hoarding as the holiday season approaches.
China
China And U.S. Sign Agreement On Food Safety Amid Rising Inflation And Pork Prices
The United States and China inked an agreement on food safety in Beijing on Dec. 11, signaling a cooling of the trade friction which has affected exports of U.S. pork and poultry to China this summer and fall. China also notified the U.S. government that it has restored pork import eligibility to six of the eleven U.S. plants that were de-listed due to Ractopamine detections. Pork shipped from the re-listed plants must comply with China’s zero tolerance standard for Ractopamine.
The memorandum of agreement (MOA) establishes certification requirements for an initial list of Chinese food and feed products including preserved foods and vegetables (e.g. canned mushrooms), pet foods, food and feed ingredients (e.g. wheat gluten and rice protein) and farm-raised fish. The MOA calls for the Chinese quarantine and certification agency (AQSIQ) to pre-register establishments that wish to ship any of these products to the United States. AQSIQ must also certify each shipment from approved establishments and notify the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of pending shipments using a unique certification ID number. AQSIQ will also monitor the safety of shipments through testing. The agreement also contains “early warning” mechanisms for problem shipments, and provides access to Chinese plants by HHS and Food and Drug Agency inspectors.
The MOA was signed as part of Tuesday’s Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) bilateral discussions, which precede the third round of biannual Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) trade talks in Beijing, scheduled to begin today. The signatories of the agreement were the HHS and AQSIQ.
The China food safety issue emerged this summer from relative obscurity to top the A list of bilateral issues, which also include intellectual property rights and the Chinese Yuan-U.S. dollar exchange rate. Despite U.S. concern over the safety of Chinese food imports, bilateral agricultural trade is expanding rapidly. The value of U.S. imports of Chinese agricultural, forestry and aquaculture products for the first nine months of 2007 was up 13 percent over the record pace of last year. U.S. imports of consumer-oriented Chinese agricultural products were up 44 percent over last year’s level. U.S. exports of agricultural, forestry and aquaculture products during the first nine months of 2007 reached $5.98 billion, up 8.3 percent compared to the same period in 2006.
China is striving to shed its image as a source of shoddy goods and unsafe food. On Halloween, China approved its first comprehensive national law on food safety, the culmination of a decade-long effort to link together a patchwork of food safety regulations that stretched across a number of government institutions and ministries. Last Monday, Guangdong announced it had become the first province to detail legal sanctions which will be applied to substandard food factories, food retailers and foodservice operations. And in an uncharacteristic public statement by a top Chinese official, Vice Premier Wu Yi, China’s top food and product safety watchdog, spelled out China’s efforts to improve food and product safety on yesterday’s Asian Wall Street Journal editorial page.
In addition to new laws, Chinese quality and hygiene inspection squads have fanned out across the country this fall in an effort to shutter illegal and unhygienic food operations. According to official Chinese sources, the Ministry of Health has closed 41,000 restaurants since September, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the agency regulating businesses, has closed 2,800 small rural food plants, 6,396 illegal pork slaughter facilities, and 1,112 of the more than 23,500 legal slaughter establishments.
Although USMEF does not believe China’s food safety crackdown is significantly impacting the food marketing chain, the campaign comes at a time of surging food prices. China announced Tuesday that inflation spiked to an 11-year high of 6.9 percent in November due to rising food prices. According to USMEF-Beijing, after drifting slightly downward in late summer, pork prices in the capital climbed over the last eight weeks to a historic high. Yesterday, China’s central government issued an edict to authorities in 36 major cities to keep 10-day reserves of cooking oil and other foodstuffs, in order to ameliorate further price rises and discourage hoarding as the holiday season approaches.