BEIJING, China (AP) -- A key Chinese official criticized a U.S. block on its seafood as "indiscriminate" and urged closer cooperation on food safety between the two trading partners, state media said Saturday.
"China cannot accept the indiscriminate and automatic detention of four kinds of Chinese seafood by the United States" Li Changjiang, the head of China's top quality watchdog, was quoted as saying.
Li made his comments late Friday during a telephone conversation with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday it would detain three types of fish -- catfish, basa and dace -- as well as shrimp and eel after repeated testing turned up contamination with drugs unapproved in the United States for use in farmed seafood.
U.S. officials said there have been no reports of illnesses, nor do the products pose any immediate health risk. They stopped short of ordering a ban on the fresh and frozen seafood.
The action comes amid a slew of consumer alerts by U.S. federal regulators over lead paint in Chinese-made toy trains, defective tires from the eastern city of Hangzhou, and imported Chinese toothpaste made with diethylene glycol, a toxic ingredient more commonly found in antifreeze.
The safety scandals have put at risk surging Chinese agricultural exports to the United States, which reached $2.26 billion last year, led by poultry products, sausage casings, shellfish, spices and apple juice.
Li, the head of China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said that there were a "handful of Chinese seafood enterprises" that had problems with quality control but that this did not warrant a blanket detention on all Chinese exporters of those types of seafood, Xinhua reported.
He told Leavitt that some U.S. exports to China also had quality issues and that the two sides should properly resolve such problems by cooperating more closely.
Earlier this week, China announced it had seized shipments of U.S.-made orange pulp and dried apricots containing high levels of bacteria and preservatives.
Leavitt was quoted as saying the United States would send a team to China soon to negotiate a solution to the seafood block.
The FDA said sampling of Chinese imported fish between October and May repeatedly found traces of the antibiotics nitrofuran and fluoroquinolone, as well as the antifungals malachite green and gentian violet. The FDA will allow individual shipments of the five seafood species into the country if a company can show the products are free of residues of these drugs.
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