Baika Hayashi, president of the Japan-based Hayashi Trading Company Co. Ltd, said her trip to the on-going China AG Trade Fair was "worthy." The five-day fair is expected close Friday, but Hayashi has already had talks with nearly 20 agricultural products suppliers in China and reached agreements with some of them.

"It's much easier to do business in China now than before," said Hayashi. "Japanese consumers are very picky about produce. They care about the quality, packaging, even the shape of the products. But Chinese suppliers could meet our demand most of times."

Hayashi has bought Chinese farming products and sell them in Japan since 1990. Because of good profit through all these years, the company has set up several supply bases in China now, in Shandong, Shanghai, and Fujian.

Zhang Chunyin, a produce supplier from east China's Jiangsu province, brought dried radish samples to Hayashi. They reached aninitial agreement at last year's fair.

"She is basically satisfied with our product, but she has rigidrequirement on the length and the thickness of the radish. Our price is competitive and all our products are green food without pollution, but we have to pay more attention to our processing procedure," said Zhang.

China is one of the major suppliers of farm produce in the world. The output of products like fruits, aquatics, meat and eggstook a lead internationally. In 2003, China registered an import and export volume of 40.36 billion US dollars of agricultural products, including an export of 21.43 billion US dollar worth.

An official with the International Cooperation Department underthe Ministry of Agriculture said that because of low labor costs, the price of China's produce on the world market was attractive, but in recent years, green food and organic food has caught more and more attention from international buyers.

According to the fair's organizing committee, most of the 7.5 billion yuan-worth contracts signed at the fair so far were for green food and organic food.

"China has begun to try to produce agricultural products according to the taste and diet habits of the Western world," saidHu Shan, representative for the US Atlantic Coast Function Foods Organic Product Administration Office. "The supportive policies onthe development of green food and organic food is good evidence."

But some buyers from overseas also expressed their worries about the stability of quality of China's agricultural products.

"China has the labor and manpower to produce large quantities of farming products, the quality is improving, the packaging is improving," said William Irion, President of Irion Enterprises, a consulting and trade company in the US. "The problem is, the levelis different in different parts of the country, even between different companies."

The Chinese government has realized the situation. An expert with the Ministry of Agriculture noted that some Chinese farming products have blocked outside some Western markets in the past years, partly because of the trade barriers of some countries, partly because of the instability of Chinese products.

To solve the problem, the country launched a "safe farming product project" in 2001, and set up a center in 2002 to supervisethe quality and safety of export farming products.

Source: Xinhua