The Chinese government will come under political pressure to ease the restrictions that it imposes on food imports because of expressed concerns about the health of plants and animals, notably from developed countries with high standards of cleanliness.

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One of its responsibilities upon joining the World Trade Organisation has been to declare the so-called ‘sanitary and phytosanitary’ controls it has in place on food exports; China has now done so, making 135 separate
notifications.


These have highlighted bans on the import of:



  • Products from cloven-hoofed animals from the Netherlands, Burma, Israel, Taiwan, Mongolia, Thailand, Kuwait, Malawi, Bahrain, Brazil, Malaysia, Kirghyzia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Guinea, Zimbabwe, Peru, Iran and Turkey, because of recent foot-and-mouth outbreaks;

  • Beef from any BSE-affected country;

  • Lamb from scrapie-affected countries;

  • Pork from Germany, Madagascar, Botswana, Croatia, Ghana and Italy (because of diseases such as swine fever);

  • Poultry from Connecticut, in the US, and Italy because of an avian influenza outbreak, and from Brazil, France and Luxembourg because of outbreaks of Newcastle disease.

There are also rules on quarantine for live plants, apples from the US, fish, meat, controls on types of wheat, (especially from Japan), and many other controls.


Diplomats at the WTO headquarters in Geneva say that the mass-declaration was insisted upon by existing members to throw light on the restrictions and encourage governments to challenge them via the organisation’s disputes procedure.

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By Keith Nuthall, just-food.com correspondent