China expands range of produce quality monitoring

BEIJING - China will expand the range of its produce quality monitoring to improve food safety, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The ministry will add 28 monitoring indices, including some pesticides and veterinary antibiotics, to the current 94-item produce quality monitoring list.

Monitoring efforts will be targeted at vegetables, fruit, tea, livestock, poultry and seafood. The produce quality monitoring mechanism started in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Shenzhen in 2001 and now covers over 150 cities in 31 provincial regions.

The overall pass rate for sample testing stood at 97.8 percent in 2017, up 0.3 percentage points year-on-year.

The agriculture ministry has called 2018 "the year of agriculture quality," outlining major tasks including promoting green production, wider quality monitoring and brand promotion.