The United States prepared to open its first Food and Drug Administration offices outside the country Wednesday as it works with China to strengthen measures to ensure products imported into the U.S. are safe.
Worries about the quality of Chinese exports to America have become a major feature of bilateral trade ties, with substandard Chinese food and toxin-laced toothpaste among product safety scares this past year.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said a new strategy was needed because the United States imported $2 trillion worth of goods this year.
"When one sees the enormity of that, it becomes clear you cannot inspect everything," he said at a news conference Tuesday after a product safety workshop with Chinese officials. "We have to change our strategy from one of simple inspections at the border. We have to build quality into every product in every step of the process."
The FDA office in Beijing was to be opened Wednesday and will be followed by two more in China later this month. Offices will open in India and Latin America by the end of the year as the FDA tries to globalize its presence.
The staffers will inspect local facilities, provide guidance on U.S. quality standards, and eventually train local experts to conduct inspections on behalf of the FDA.
"We are embarking on a system that will recognize the need to ensure that everything that comes to the U.S. has been subject to either heightened scrutiny by our regulators or has been certified as meeting our standards by someone we trust," Leavitt said.
China's health minister, Chen Zhu, characterized Tuesday's meeting as "not only candid but frank."
Leavitt and the agency's Food and Drug Commissioner, Andrew von Eschenbach, said the new measures would include better technology for detecting contamination, greater demands for corporate responsibility and increased sharing of information.
Experts say the FDA's presence may help solve some problems but the impetus still has to come from China.
The FDA offices "can't hurt but it also can't do very much unless the Chinese want change and cooperate to make that happen," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, who has consulted for the FDA.
In the past year, China has increased inspections and tightened restrictions on food production and other industries, after a series of global product scandals.
Most recently, dairy products tainted with the industrial chemical melamine have been blamed in the deaths of at least three babies in China. Tens of thousands of other children were sickened.
Chen, the minister, said the Chinese government should not only work speedily and be open when a product safety crisis arises, but people should be treated quickly and businesses should release information on problematic products and recall them voluntarily.
Still, it's an uphill battle for China to regulate its countless small and illegally run operations, which are often blamed for introducing chemicals and food additives into the murky food chain.
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