China must do more, Brussels says as dangerous imports rise

Apr 20, 2009, 12:04 GMT

Brussels - China must do more to make its manufacturers produce safe goods, the European Union's consumer affairs commissioner said Monday as a report revealed that record numbers of dangerous Chinese imports were seized in the EU in 2008.

China's product-safety authorities have investigated roughly half of the cases of dangerous Chinese goods which the EU has discovered in recent years, and this is 'not good enough,' Meglena Kuneva told journalists in Brussels.

Nonetheless, 'we started in 2007 with almost zero investigated cases ... so starting with zero and now having half investigated is an improvement,' she said.

According to the latest report from the European Union's alert network for dangerous consumer goods, RAPEX, released Monday, EU member states raised the alarm in 2008 over no fewer than 1,555 different products, ranging from toys to motor vehicles, which could endanger the user's health and safety.

Close to two thirds of all the products in question - 909 cases - came from China, the EU's single largest supplier of manufactured goods and its second most important trading partner.

That is an even higher proportion than in 2007, when Chinese-made goods were the subject of just over half the health scares in the EU.

Under an agreement put in place in 2006, the EU passes information on dangerous goods to China's quality authorities. So far, they have responded by cracking down on or banning exports of 352 different products, out of roughly 2,000 cases reported in the EU.

Kuneva said that cooperation between the EU and China on product safety was improving rapidly.

'We shouldn't take this as a signal to close our markets. We need good, non-dangerous products from China, but not at the expense of safety,' she said.