While fears rise over heavy metals in Chinese rice, a sample test of rice sold in Shenzhen showed that all rice met national food safety standards, the city s market supervision administration said Thursday.
Heavy metal contamination of rice caused a public outcry over the past three days after Chinese media published a survey showing at least 10 percent of the samples from various provinces contained excessive amounts of cadmium, a heavy metal prone to cause bone problems.
The administration conducts at least four sample tests of rice being sold in the city through retail channels each year. The latest test showed the samples were not contaminated with excessive levels of heavy metals and met the country s food safety standards, the administration said.
But details of the sample test, including where the sampled rice was produced and purchased from, were not available at press time.
We will release the detailed sample test results very soon, Peng Conglin, the administration spokesperson, said Thursday.
Most rice sold at city supermarkets was from Heilongjiang, Guangxi, Jiangxi and Guangdong. China s food safety rules set caps for heavy metals per kilogram of rice at 0.2mg for cadmium, 0.3mg for lead and 0.3mg for arsenic.
Pan Guoxing, a professor at Nanjing Agriculture University s Agricultural Resources and Environmental Institute, led a team testing more than 100 rice samples bought from markets in six regions in 2007 and found 10 percent of them contained excessive levels of cadmium.
The next year, they conducted similar tests on 63 rice samples purchased from Jiangxi, Hunan and Guangdong and found 60 percent of the samples contained excessive cadmium, the Century Weekly magazine reported.
Experts said the situation could be worse now, because soil pollution, the main cause of farm product contamination, was spreading along with China s rapid industrialization.
We have seen so many food safety scandals in recent years. Why don t the supervising authorities improve their functions? Why can t the producers and sellers spare a moment to think about people s health, not all about profit? said a consumer, Wu Huiling.
