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U.S., EU call for tighter safety norms

SHANGHAI: American and EU trade officials on Wednesday called for tighter safety regulations for Chinese products in the wake of the contaminated milk scandal that sickened more than 53,000 babies in China.

Officials from the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) and EU, this week, launched a product safety initiative to highlight the need for stricter safety requirements.

The requirements largely apply to children’s toys and Chinese electronics products. “Obviously, the milk situation does not help the reputation of Chinese brands,” CPSC’s acting chairman Nancy Nord told The Hindu. “This underscores the importance of this mission we are carrying out by being here in China,” she said.

“It is important that Chinese manufacturers understand that safety is a core value and they cannot cut corners. If an American consumer is injured… that does no good for a Chinese company in building its business. They will have jeopardised their business, and jeopardised the Chinese brand,” she added.

The CPSC’s new regulations, which come into effect in November, would require a range of Chinese products to receive certification from approved bodies before they can be exported.

The regulations would focus on improving the safety standards of toys, which came into focus in June 2007 when toy-makers Hasbro and Mattel recalled products after discovering high levels of lead in the paint.

Now, the CPSC would require any Chinese exporter to have the products tested by independent, CPSC-approved laboratories.

Earlier this week, Ms. Nord led the delegation to the southern industrial city of Guangzhou, the heart of China’s toy-manufacturing industry, to brief manufacturers on the new regulations.

“We heard their concerns about the increasing costs that will likely result,” she said, adding: “That is something we have to recognise and be mindful of, but safety is a value we have to insist upon.”

The contamination of the milk sold by 22 dairy brands with the industrial chemical melamine has raised serious questions about China’s product safety regulatory mechanism.

Suppliers tainted the milk by adding melamine to cut their costs — the presence of melamine artificially appears to increase protein content. Four babies died after consuming tainted milk, and more than 13,000 others are still receiving treatment.

On Monday, the head of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), the state’s safety watchdog, resigned, after it emerged that complaints against the Sanlu diary company had been registered as early as in December 2007.

E.U. and U.S. officials said they enjoyed productive discussions with the AQSIQ, which has promised to upgrade its safety monitoring systems.

“The AQSIQ is, in fact, trying to put in place traceability measures [to identify offending manufacturers], but there are technical and commercial barriers to doing that,” said Jacqueline Minor, director for consumer affairs in the EU’s Directorate-General for Health and Consumers.

“The real problem is they cannot always track down the person and company responsible, but when they have done so, the EU has been satisfied with their response,” she said. The new product safety regulations would make it mandatory for manufacturers to fix tracking labels on their products to make detection easier for authorities.

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