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 determining 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 percent
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 percent, live pig
samples tested for the clenbuterol contamination 98.9 percent, the
aquatic product samples tested for the chloramphenicol residues
99.4 percent.
Liu said the findings showed that agricultural product quality
and safety are reliable in China.
Statistics showed that there are in total 323 ministerial
quality and safety testing centers for agricultural products, and
the Supervision and Testing Center for Vegetable Quality of MOA is
only one of them whose special focus is on vegetable quality and
safety. 12 percent of the centers focus on multi-purpose testing,
59 percent is specialized in testing of crop, animal or aquatic
products, 18 percent for testing agricultural inputs, and 11
percent for other testing purposes. There are also more than 200
provincial testing centers and more than 1500 testing centers at
the county level.
(Xinhua News Agency August 3, 2007)