China Moves to Improve Quality of Its Seafood

SHANGHAI — Responding to growing global concerns about the quality and safety of its seafood, China said this week that it would introduce an array of production standards to improve safety and guard against the use of illegal veterinary drugs.

An official of the Ministry of Agriculture said in a speech Thursday that the new standards would cover 100 categories, everything from breeding fish and seafood products to disease prevention and drug controls.

In the speech, the vice minister of agriculture, Niu Dun, said the agency would “investigate illegal production licenses” and confront “shoddy quality control behavior to improve fish production quality and safety standards.”

The government also said it would work to produce a more environmentally friendly mode of production, one of the biggest challenges facing China’s seafood industry.

The move, which was first announced at a seafood conference in the capital on Monday, is the latest food safety initiative to come out of Beijing, which is pushing aggressively to ensure Chinese consumers and importers of Chinese food that the country’s products are safe and healthy.

Read the full New York Times story here.