The flood of Chinese products into the European Union hasn’t slowed, but many of them are still far too dangerous and China must do more to make its manufacturers produce safe goods, the European Union’s consumer affairs commissioner said after a report revealed that record numbers of unsafe Chinese imports were seized in the EU in 2008. China’s product- safety authorities have investigated roughly half of the cases of dangerous Chinese goods which the EU has discovered in recent years, and this is “not good enough,” Meglena Kuneva told journalists in Brussels.

Nonetheless, “We started in 2007 with almost zero investigated cases ... so starting with zero and now having half investigated is an improvement,” she said. According to the latest report from the EU’s alert network for dangerous consumer goods, RAPEX, EU member states raised the alarm in 2008 over no fewer than 1,555 different products, ranging from toys to motor vehicles, which could endanger the user’s health and safety. Close to two-thirds of all the products in question - 909 cases - came from China, the EU’s single largest supplier of manufactured goods and its second most important trading partner. That included a tricycle with a dangerously loose handlebar, leather shoes packaged with the harmful chemical DMF, and children’s jackets that have neck lacings that could strangle the wearer.

The proportion is even higher than in 2007, when Chinese-made goods were the subject of just over half the health scares in the EU. Under an agreement put in place in 2006, the EU passes information on dangerous goods to China’s quality authorities. So far, they have responded by cracking down on or banning exports of 352 different products, out of roughly 2,000 cases reported in the EU. The issue hit the headlines in the summer of 2007, when scares over Chinese toys containing lead paint and dangerous mini-magnets led to the recall of millions of toys around the world. In the wake of the scandal, the EU launched a concerted drive with the US to push for better export quality standards in China.

Kuneva said that, since the scandal, cooperation between the EU and China on product safety had improved rapidly. “We shouldn’t take this as a signal to close our markets. We need good, non-dangerous products from China, but not at the expense of safety,” she said. The EU is keen for China’s support in fighting the current economic crisis and the long-term challenge of climate change, making it wary of criticizing Beijing too strongly. Kuneva said that one in five of all the dangerous products identified in the EU in 2008 came from within the bloc - 82 of them from its biggest member, Germany. But she singled out for praise Dutchbased electronics giant Philips for pulling off the shelves more than seven million coffee machines which had been found to carry a fire hazard.