China will cooperate more with the European Union (EU) to develop safety and security criteria for products, a leading official from the top product quality supervision authority said Wednesday.

To increase joint efforts to establish a product safety control system, the two sides have agreed to establish a joint information platform for industrial products, Wei Chuanzhong, vice minister of General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), said.

"We will assess what it will take to set up a database for the platform by the end of this year," Wei said.

"The information platform will help solve problems arising from bilateral trade, providing a more effective way to push forward win-win trade development," Wei said.

Wei made the remarks after the sixth annual meeting of the Negotiating Mechanism on Sino-EU Industrial Product and WTO/TBT (World Trade Organization/technical bar-riers to trade), which took place in Beijing yesterday.

Under the negotiating mechanism, which was launched early in 2002, China and the EU have set up 10 working groups covering trade issues in several industrial sectors, such as textiles, medical devices, electrical and mechanical devices, chemicals and cosmetics.

He said a four-month product-safety inspection campaign launched by the AQSIQ is currently underway nationwide.

Prior to yesterday's meeting, the EU also signed the first agreement for cooperation on pharmaceuticals and related products with the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration, according to the delegation of the European Commission to China.

"We will not impose any discriminative supervision regulations on Chinese products exported to the EU market. Instead, we are willing to offer technological support to Chinese enterprises to ensure an effective control over product safety," Heinz Zourek, director general for Enterprise and Industry of the European Commission, said.

(China Daily October 25, 2007)