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BEIJING: China must change its approach to food safety, the United Nations said Wednesday, arguing outdated thinking may have prolonged a milk crisis that sickened thousands of babies and damaged the country's image.
In a newly released report on food safety in China, the UN urged Beijing to adopt a "modern" food safety law that clarifies authority and enforcement responsibilities and is in line with global trading requirements.
"The present system is managed by several laws and an old philosophy that government is responsible for everything," Jorgen Schlundt, the director of the UN's department of food safety, told journalists.
"We have to change that kind of philosophy because we need the food producers to be responsible for food safety," he said.
The report was issued amid a tainted milk scandal that has sickened up to 53,000 infants, left the nation's milk industry in tatters and badly damaged the "made in China" label.
"In this incident we see that an old-fashioned system contributed to the event," Schlundt said.
"This disjointed system with disjointed authority between different ministries and agencies had resulted in broken communication and may have prolonged the outbreak with a late response."
The report called on China to set up a unified and enforceable system capable of ensuring product safety from farm to table, and which would highlight the responsibilities of producers to make safe food.
China needed to educate its companies to better understand the role they play in building market confidence both domestically and abroad, he said.
The ongoing milk scandal erupted when melamine, an industrial chemical normally used to make plastic, was discovered in Chinese-made dairy products, including baby formula, liquid milk and yoghurt.
The chemical was added to watered-down milk to make it appear higher in protein.
Although at least one company knew of the scam for months, it did not immediately report it to local government officials, who in turn delayed passing on the news for nearly a month.
The scandal has hit China's dairy industry hard, and continues to escalate around the world as a growing number of multinationals and countries recall Chinese milk products.
- AFP/yt
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