Q&A: Interview with US health secretary
Updated: 2007-12-10 17:24
Li Xing: How are the relations between the quality watchdogs from the two countries now compared to the past years?
Michael Leavitt: I’m not sure if I am able to compare them. I wasn’t around in year’s past. But I know that now we are working very hard to develop relationships that will allow for Chinese consumers to buy American goods and American consumers to buy Chinese goods. What we both want is assurance that they meet our standards. When an American company sends something to China, you need to know that it is quality and safe. When a Chinese company sends something to the American consumers, they deserve to know it is high quality and safe.
Li Xing: How close are the two countries safety watchdogs working together nowadays?
Michael Leavitt: Quite closely and we want it to be closer. For example, we are going to be opening an office in China for our food and drug administration. That will mean that we can work more closely together.
We routinely want to have Chinese food and drug inspectors and administrative personnel come to the United States, and if China was inclined to open an office in the US, I'm sure that option would be open to them as well.
Li Xing: While we are talking about import and product safety, how do you deal with quality and food problems, safety problems within the United States?
Michael Leavitt:That's actually something we want to do better on because we are not perfect in the United States. We have our own food safety. We do have problems from time to time. It is a good system. But it is not adequate for the future. We know that, if we see more and more products coming from other countries. We have to have a better system. We have just recently published a plan to overhaul our system and to improve it, that includes many of the things we have already talked about.
Li Xing: So what are your biggest challenges in maintaining high quality for your food products?
Michael Leavitt: First, it's recognizing we can't inspect everything. So we have to build quality in at every step of the way. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. I went to a lettuce processing plant. The manager of the plant said our motto is "know your grower", meaning know where your product came from.
He said I don't simply want to know where it came from. I want to know the quality of the water that was put on the plant as it was growing. I want to know the nutrients that were fed to it. I want to know who picked it, I want to know the day they picked it. I want to know how cold it was kept after they picked it. Who transported it. In other words, knowing the quality of the process every step of the way, rather than saying I know it came from this place or that. I want to know that quality was built in. That's the challenge of the 21st Century - it's building quality in to the every step of the way, rather than simply standing at the border and trying to catch things that might be unsafe or of low quality from coming into a country or finding their way to the shelf. I understand that this is a big concern in China, in the same way that it is in the United States. We all want safe food, we all want high-quality food.
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