Chinese regulators announced stepped up food safety inspections yesterday ahead of the country’s biggest holiday, Lunar New Year, in continuing efforts to crack down on the poorly regulated manufacturing industry.
Inspectors will target supermarkets, restaurants and food additive producing factories in seven provinces, including Hebei, the heart of last year’s melamine-tainted milk scandal, Health Ministry spokesman Mao Qun’an said.
“We’ll seriously check for illegal substances and additives in food and will severely punish companies or individuals who violate the law,” Mao said at a news conference.
The week-long Lunar New Year holiday, also known as the Spring Festival, starts on Jan. 26 and is usually celebrated with family gatherings and sumptuous feasts.
The campaign is the latest step by China’s authorities to improve the country’s shoddy food safety record.
The manufacturing industry has been shaken by recurring scandals, including one last year where hundreds of thousands of children were sickened by milk contaminated by the industrial chemical melamine.
Authorities accuse suppliers of watering down the milk and then adding nitrogen-rich melamine to make it seem higher in protein when tested.
Mao said yesterday that the latest government figures show 296,000 babies were sickened and almost 53,000 were hospitalized. The deaths of six babies have also been linked to the scandal.
Last month, the government released a list of banned substances in an attempt to weed out the practice of augmenting food products with nonfood additives.
Among the 17 banned substances was boric acid, commonly used as an insecticide, which is mixed with noodles and meatballs to increase elasticity. Also forbidden was industrial formaldehyde and lye, used in making soap and drain cleaner and added to water used to soak some types of dried seafood to make the products appear fresher and bigger.
Various industrial dyes used to improve the appearance of food products, ranging from chili powder to tea to cooked meats, were also prohibited.
Even so, it’s an uphill task because of murky supply chains and numerous small, sometimes illegally operated establishments, which are hard to monitor.
State media has said officially there are about 500,000 food processors and 70 percent have fewer than 10 employees.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
RSS