National Seminar and Exchange Meeting on Raw Milk Quality and Safety Supervision and Monitoring Held
Website news On April 16, the National Seminar and Exchange Meeting on Raw Milk Quality and Safety Supervision and Monitoring was held in Changsha City, Hunan Province. The meeting comprehensively summarized the 2014 dairy production and raw milk quality and safety supervision work, analyzed the current situation and tasks facing the dairy industry, studied measures to promote the transformation and upgrading of the dairy industry, and deployed key tasks for 2015.
The meeting pointed out that in 2014, the national dairy industry remained generally stable, with increased output, steady improvement in raw milk quality and safety, and accelerated industrial transformation and upgrading. National milk output reached 37.25 million tons, a year-on-year increase of 5.5%; per-unit yield of dairy cows continued to rise, with Holstein dairy cows reaching 6 tons per unit; large-scale dairy farming advanced rapidly, with the proportion of farms with more than 100 head reaching 45%, an increase of 3 percentage points over the previous year. In 2014, the Ministry of Agriculture organized spot checks on 26,000 batches of raw milk samples, and all test values for melamine and other substances were qualified, with no major quality and safety incidents occurring.
The meeting emphasized that agricultural and rural economic development currently faces the major task of adjusting structure and transforming the development model, and dairy industry development faces severe challenges from intensifying domestic and international market competition, making it urgent to accelerate the transformation and upgrading of China's dairy industry. In the long term, accelerating the transformation and upgrading of the dairy industry requires adjusting development goals, shifting from an emphasis on quantitative growth to placing equal importance on quantity, quality, and efficiency; adjusting the dairy production layout and breed structure, developing emerging production areas in the south, actively developing dual-purpose dairy and beef breeds such as Simmental, and developing locally advantageous products such as pasteurized milk and yogurt; transforming dairy farming methods, promoting an ecological circular farming model that combines planting and breeding, with planting for the sake of breeding; innovating the institutional mechanisms for dairy industry development, encouraging enterprises to extend forward and backward along the industrial chain, and exploring an integrated development path of planting, breeding, and processing; cultivating new types of dairy industry operating entities, focusing on family farms, cooperatives, and large-scale farms, and training a large number of new-type dairy farmers to build a modern dairy industry; and transforming publicity methods, shifting from passively responding to media to actively publicizing and reporting, guiding scientific consumption, and boosting consumer confidence.
The meeting required that in 2015, dairy industry authorities at all levels should follow the approach of “stabilizing production and increasing income while adjusting structure, improving quality and efficiency while transforming the development model, strictly supervising to ensure safety, and promoting solutions to the difficulty of selling milk,” and focus on five areas of work: First, strengthening raw milk quality and safety supervision; Second, accelerating dairy production development; Third, vigorously implementing the action to revitalize the dairy alfalfa development; Fourth, increasing training efforts; Fifth, strengthening publicity and guidance. The meeting particularly emphasized that in response to the current “difficulty of selling milk” problem, all localities should actively coordinate with dairy enterprises to guarantee procurement, treat dairy farmers well, and promote the introduction of relevant policies and measures to stabilize dairy production.
At the meeting, experts from the National Dairy Cattle Industry Technology System, the Ministry of Agriculture's Dairy and Dairy Products Quality Inspection Center, and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences introduced the latest domestic and international scientific and technological progress in the dairy industry, the national raw milk quality and safety monitoring situation, and the operation of the raw milk purchasing station management system, respectively; the three provinces of Hebei, Shandong, and Ningxia exchanged experiences on dairy production, raw milk quality supervision, and alfalfa development practices.