(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-10-15 19:51

JINAN -- China is displaying its beefed up food quality control initiatives at the Fifth China Agricultural Trade Fair.

Bar-coded foodstuffs now allow food inspectors and shopkeepers to instantly read an item's provenance, with the aid of a simple scanner which can then display the information on a computer screen.

Information stored on a product, for instance a cucumber, includes the producer's name, how the cucumber was grown, when it was picked and how it was transported.

During the past couple of years the reputation of Chinese foodstuffs has suffered in the wake of several food scares which have seen products hastily removed from the shelves of stores across the globe.

Scares that hit the headlines ranged from parasite-infested snails, ducks and hens that were fed cancer-causing Sudan Red dye to make their egg yolks red, to pet food made of melamine-tainted wheat protein that killed scores of dogs and cats in the United States.

In a further bid to reassure the public, the government also introduced recall systems for unsafe food on August 31 and launched four-month-long safety inspections nationwide starting from late August, including clamp-downs on banned toxic chemicals in farm products and carcinogenic malachite green and nitrofurans in aquatic products.

All the efforts have started to pay off as the country's food quality increases.

Quality of China's agricultural products is now higher than before, and 99 percent of its food exports to the United States, the European Union and Japan met quality standards over the last four years, the Minister of Agriculture Sun Zhengcai said.

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