China will establish a nationwide grocery tracking system to ensure food safety, said State Administration for Industry and Commerce director Zhou Bohua here on Tuesday.
By the end of this year, all food markets and supermarkets in cities above county level would have set up the system requiring invoices and documents attached to purchased commodities, he said.
All township, street-side and community groceries shall set up a system of keeping real-time records when purchasing and selling commodities.
The above measures are aimed at supervising product quality and food safety more effectively in accordance with the campaign, launched on Aug. 25, to strengthen the supervision and administration of the safety of food and other products.
"The tracking system sounds good but I doubt if it will really work, especially on the street stalls, such as the kebab stands," said Zhang Jianxin, a 42-year-old lawyer in Beijing.
"The vendors usually come out at night and play hide-and-seek with the authorities," he said.
Since the start of the campaign, officials have checked more than 17,000 wholesale markets and trading fairs, involving 372,000 companies and individual vendors.
The authorities have confiscated substandard goods worth 227 million yuan and closed 9,098 unlicensed stores since last year, said Zhou.
"Actually, I like the street food stands by my university," said Tu Minghua, a student at Tsinghua University.
"It's more convenient to go there when most restaurants are closed at night," Tu said, "and the food is cheap and tastes better. Moreover, it's nice to have a drink there with friends."
Complaints over the last couple of months about Chinese product quality and food safety -- such as lead paint on toys and pesticide residues -- have raised widespread doubt about made-in-China products.
The government has responded with a series of campaigns, including opening the national work conference on product quality and food safety, issuing a white paper on food safety, establishing a national leading group on product quality and food safety and launching recall systems for food and toys. (One U.S. dollar is equal to 7.53 yuan)
Source: Xinhua
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