Guangzhou, China, Sept 22 - The scandal over tainted Chinese milk products that made thousands of infants ill underscores the need to eliminate shortcuts in production, a U.S. official said on Monday as the United States and Europe escalate their engagement with Beijing on product safety.
China reported late on Sunday that nearly 13,000 infants were sick in hospital after drinking milk formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which can be added to watered-down milk to fool quality checks but causes kidney problems.
"It illustrates that constant vigilance is needed. It illustrates that you have to make sure that you understand what is coming into your plant, what the raw materials are," Nancy Nord, acting chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, (CPSC) told Reuters.
While the quality and inspection of milk imports to the United States fell under the remit of the Food and Drug Administration and not the CPSC, Nord said the issue was telling.
"I think this situation very much underscores the need to make sure that producers of products have in place appropriate quality control mechanisms up and down the chain of distribution. That they understand the safety requirements and that we, as safety regulators, make very clear to them that we will not tolerate shortcuts being taken."
Nord was speaking in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou on the sidelines of a U.S.-EU-China conference on compliance for manufacturers and exporters of toys, which last year were at the eye of a global storm over shoddy made-in-China goods ranging from pet food to tyres.
Mattel Inc, RC2 Corp, and other companies were forced to pull millions of Chinese-made toys from shelves in 2007, primarily due to excessive lead content in paint.
With the cost of labour and raw materials rising sharply and the Chinese currency gaining in strength, exporters' already thin margins have been further compressed and experts say that corner-cutting to save costs is rife.
In one well publicised case, a Mattel supplier committed suicide last year after his products were found to contain lead paint supplied by a trusted acquaintance trying to cut costs.
Heavy pressure on China and new regulations in the United States have resulted in fewer toy recalls due to lead, Nord said.
"We can't view this as a short-term campaign. It's good news that the number of recalls is going down. Our challenge is to make sure that that is sustainable," she said.
Former Chinese State Councillor Wu Yi labelled a campaign to improve product quality last year a success, but the milk scandal suggested that problems were chronic.
The trilateral initiative on consumer product safety compliance was an "escalation" of engagement with China on the subject, said Nord. "But it's not a reflection that things aren't getting done. I think we've made reasonable progress, but of course we've got a long way to go.
"At the end of the day the best way to assure safety is to make sure that the product is manufactured safely in the first place."