At a recent working conference, China's National Office of Food Safety asked that decisive measures be taken to completely remove all possible risks from the country's food market.
According to Chen Zhu, the director of NOFS and minister of the Ministry of Health, since the recent rectification on food safety was carried out, a number of systemic cases have been identified and prominent food safety problems are being solved. Chen said there were no major food safety incidents in China in 2009.
However, due to inefficient work, there were still food safety problems and latent food safety risks in some regions, including the melamine contamination cases of Shanghai Panda, Shaanxi Jinqiao Milk Powder Company, Shandong Lvsai'er, and Liaoning Wuzhou. It is learned that all these companies have used melamine contaminated milk powder products as raw materials for their dairy products.
NOFS stressed that work should be undertaken immediately to completely destroy melamine contaminated milk powder products from 2008. Meanwhile, it said that companies that refuse to rectify problems will be punished severely.
NOFS stated this year it will mainly focus on implementing the food safety law and related rules and building up an effective supervision system for the prevention of any possible food safety accidents.