FDA Opens New China Office

A Chinese customer inspects a carton of eggs at a WalMart branch in Beijing on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008. The FDA is opening China offices this week amid recurring product safety scares. (AP Photo/ Elizabeth Dalziel)

(AP)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration opened an office Wednesday in China's capital — its first outside the United States — as part of a new global strategy to ensure the safety of trillions of dollars of imports.

Product safety has become a key issue as American manufacturers shift operations overseas and foreign producers make inroads in the U.S.

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.

"In the past we have always been at our borders to try and catch things that were not safe or did not meet our standards," U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of the Beijing office. "In the future our new strategy is to build safety into products at every step of the way."

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After meetings with Chinese officials on Tuesday, Leavitt said both countries would work on a joint initiative to use better technology for detecting contamination, demand greater corporate responsibility and increase sharing of data and information.

Health minister Chen Zhu has said that Chinese quality officials will soon be stationed in the U.S.

In the past year, China has stepped up inspections and tightened restrictions on food production and other industries, after a series of global product scandals. Still, it's an uphill climb for Chinese authorities to regulate countless small and illegally run operations, which are often blamed for introducing chemicals and food additives into the murky food chain.

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.

Shao Mingli, a vice health minister and head of the country's food and drug administration, said the opening of the FDA office "provides a very clear signal to the whole world."