EU health and consumer safety commissioner Markos Kyprianou has met with China’s Li Changjiang, the minister in charge of quality supervision, inspection and quarantine to sign a new agreement on stemming the tide of illegal food products.
Although the Commission has no official figures on the amount of illegal food products imported into the EU from China – just six products have been identified this year, all of them poultry – the flow of counterfeit and substandard products in other areas suggests that it is a major problem.
The new agreement will focus on improving the exchange of information between China and the European Commission on illegal activities detected during routine pre-export checks or other controls.
The EU and Chinese authorities have also made the commitment to investigate and follow up information whenever illegal export consignments are detected and to notify the other party of the results of the investigations, as well as taking tougher action to stamp out illegal food production and fraud.
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