Beijing, March 13 - China and Japan will exchange teams of food safety experts and investigators in a bid to clear up a disagreement over Chinese-made dumplings that left 10 people sick in Japan, a Chinese official said on Thursday.
No one has died from the poisoned food but the case has stirred intense media coverage in Japan and threatened to strain ties between the two countries ahead of a visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Japan in coming months.
Li Changjiang, head of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said China would send a team to Japan "in the near future".
"Public Security authorities in China have also extended a similar invitation to their counterparts in Japan to discuss experiments and food safety testing methodologies," he said.
"With their joint efforts it won't be long before we reveal the final truth of the dumplings poison case," he said.
Both Beijing and Tokyo have blamed sabotage rather than production failings for causing the dumplings to be tainted, but they have been at odds over how.
They have also both been at pains to emphasise the poisoning did not happen in their home countries.
Japanese police have said the dumplings, contaminated by the pesticide methamidophus, were highly unlikely to have been tainted in Japan, given the pesticide is banned there and packages of some of the problematic dumplings remained intact.
But Chinese authorities last month said the pesticide could have seeped through the packages, and the sabotage probably happened in Japan.
Li said there was an urgent need to set up a long-term cooperation mechanism on food safety with Japan to address emerging problems.
China has been rocked by a series of scandals over tainted and substandard goods in recent months, including Chinese-made toothpaste, toys and drugs.
Li said China had made great efforts to improve its food safety and blamed the media for exaggerating food safety issues, but admitted to persistent problems among the country's thousands of small-scale producers.
"Especially among small-scale companies and food processors, product quality is unstable and some don't meet the requirements," Li said.
Li said a new food safety law, set to be approved at the current session of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, would help by setting tougher penalties for quality offenders.