China, Japan urged to boost food industry cooperation

Food safety supervision bodies from China and Japan should promote cooperation in the food industry in order to create convenient trade situations, an official with China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Wednesday. Song Yaoming, the MOC official, said that cooperation in the food industry and on agricultural products has developed well in recent years, and it plays an important role in trade cooperation between the two sides. “A steady and long-term mechanism has been established between the two countries in some industries, such as honey, frozen vegetables, fresh mushrooms and eel,” Song said, adding that communication on market situations and food supervision have been carried out annually. He suggested that relative departments from China and Japan further their cooperation, especially in disclosing information related to the food industry and setting up mutually agreed-upon food standards. According to statistics provided by Song, the total bilateral trade value between the two sides reached 342.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2011, 330 times that of 1972, China’s Xinhua news agency reported . Affected by the European debt crisis, the bilateral trade value declined 0.2 percent year on year in the first half of this year to 162 U.S. dollars, Song added.