BEIJING—U.S. food and drug regulators are requesting Beijing's help in implementing a new food-safety law requiring stricter oversight of exported food, a sign of China's growing importance as a food exporter for Americans.
Bloomberg News
Drums of apple juice concentrate are stored at athe China Haisheng Juice Holdings Co. facility in Xian, Shaanxi province,China.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials are seeking increased data sharing and communication with China and other major trading partners to identify and prevent high-risk problems in food trade, said Dara Corrigan, associate commissioner for regulatory affairs of the FDA, at a press briefing on Thursday. "Transparency on both sides is critical," she said.
U.S. requests for cooperation come as the U.S. looks to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act, a law passed in January requiring food importers to verify the safety of their food from suppliers.
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Regulators said the law is aimed at preventing food contamination rather than responding to it. The new law relies heavily on the cooperation of other countries, such as China, to comply with implementation of inspection standards.
Although the U.S. runs a fat trade surplus with China in agricultural products due in part to China's appetite for its soybeans, China is also increasingly providing food for U.S. dinner tables as well. Its food and agricultural exports more than doubled to $3.23 billion in 2010 compared with 2005, according to U.S. trade data.
Major exports include processed vegetables and fruit juices, and during that period China provided 72% of U.S. apple-juice imports.
U.S. officials at the beginning of next year will seek China's suggestions on how to implement the law's requirements. They include a system to accredit private-sector inspectors and to create a documentation system for suppliers.
Chinese officials have been strengthening oversight of food over the past few years, but food safety remains a major issue in China, even three years after a scandal in which milk contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine caused the deaths of at least six children and illnesses in 300,000 others. Recent crackdowns have unveiled a spate of problems involving food producers using chemical additives to alter food for economic gain.
China currently lacks enforcement of its food-safety laws and has an insufficient number of inspectors, said Li Tairan, a director of food safety at the Ministry of Health's Bureau of Food Safety Integrated Coordination and Health Supervision, at a food-safety conference Wednesday.
Around two-thirds of all fruits and vegetables sold in the U.S. come from foreign countries and 80% of drug ingredients are imported, according to the FDA. Imports have tripled over the past decade.
The FDA currently shares inspection information with regulators in Europe and Australia. Officials hope to share more information with China and to develop a common auditing system to determine the safety of suppliers, Ms. Corrigan said.
In recent years, the FDA has taken steps to boost foreign inspections. It opened offices in China in 2008 following an incident in which a blood thinner containing Chinese-made pharmaceutical ingredients led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of illnesses.
