One year after the implementation of the first law on food safety in China, progress has been made in recognizing and responding to the country's food-safety challenges, but the government is still hard-pressed to control the situation, a quality control official said Saturday at a major forum in Beijing.

"Only 120,000 food-related producers in China are granted production licenses, less than one third of 400,000 in total," Pu Changcheng, vice minister of General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), confessed Saturday at the second Top Forum on Food Safety.

"The current situation is not satisfactory. Despite there being sufficient room for the growth of food production and processing, China is full of small-scale companies," Pu said.

Food safety has long been a problem haunting China, where the total value of the domestic food industry reached 5 trillion yuan in 2009, equating to more than 9 percent of the country's industrial gross output that year, according to official figures.

The most recent high-profile scandals involved illegally recycled cooking oil and contaminated vegetables.

Chinese as a whole will consume about 3 million tons of recycled cooking oil this year, and authorities expect it to take about 10 years to root out this kind of oil from the daily lives of Chinese, according to a report in March by the Chongqing Evening News.

The year 2008 was seen as the darkest for China's milk industry, and the fallout helped lead to swift reforms after tainted milk resulted in the deaths of at least six infants and an estimated 300,000 were stricken with kidney problems.

Su Jinsheng, an engineer at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, admitted that "the food-safety situation in China is still serious, with profit-driven companies manufacturing and trading fake goods, which constitutes a grave threat to people's health and the reputation of China's industries."

The safety of Chinese food isn't just a domestic issue. Made-in-China products, such as seafood and dairy, have become part of the daily diets of many Westerners. The latest figures show that China's food exports to the US rose to US$31 billion from January to November 2008, up 13.8 percent from the same period in 2007, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

As a result, China has ratcheted up efforts to ensure the production of safe food.

China's State Council, or Cabinet, set up a food-safety commission in February. It's headed by Vice Premier Li Keqiang.

No single agency or ministry in China is solely responsible for food safety. Officials from different departments -- the AQSIQ, the quality watchdog in China, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Health -- attended the forum.

Progress has been made, according to officials. Since 2003, agricultural food safety has been improving, and the average qualification rate of sampled products has topped 95 percent in the past three years, Jin Fazhong, director of the Department of Market and Economic Information at the Ministry of Agriculture, said at the forum.

The qualification rate for China's food exports to Japan, the biggest export market for China, reached more than 99 percent from 2004 to 2008. And the rate for food exports to the US and EU also topped 99 percent in the same period, the China News Agency reported.