Preventing and Controlling Agricultural Risks to Ensure Safety and Achieve the Two Ensures Goals

In 2014, veterinary departments at all levels closely focused on the goal and task put forward by the Party Leadership Group of the Ministry of Agriculture of "striving to ensure that no regional major animal epidemic occurs and no major animal product quality and safety incident occurs," actively prevented and controlled the risk of animal diseases, and strictly supervised the safety of food of animal origin, and veterinary work achieved positive results.

The overall animal epidemic situation remained stable. As of December 4, only 4 outbreaks of type A foot-and-mouth disease, 2 outbreaks of type O foot-and-mouth disease, and 4 outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in poultry had occurred nationwide. The whole country had gone 67 consecutive months without an outbreak of Asia I foot-and-mouth disease. After peste des petits ruminants was reintroduced into the country from abroad, it was quickly and effectively controlled. At the 82nd International Congress of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), China was recognized by the OIE as a country with negligible risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and a country free of African horse sickness.

The supervision of the safety of food of animal origin was solidly advanced. From January to November 2014, 10.4 billion head (birds) of livestock and poultry were quarantined at the place of origin nationwide, and 5.6 billion head (birds) of livestock and poultry were quarantined at slaughter, and all diseased animals detected were subjected to harmless treatment. The "Opinions of the General Office of the State Council on Establishing a Mechanism for the Harmless Treatment of Dead Livestock and Poultry" was formally issued, the pilot work on harmless treatment of dead livestock and poultry was fully launched, and more than 20 million dead pigs from large-scale farms in the breeding phase were subjected to harmless treatment, an increase of more than 70% year on year. In the first three quarters of this year, a total of 10,506 batches of veterinary drugs were inspected nationwide, of which 10,030 batches were qualified, a qualification rate of 95.5%, up 1.6 percentage points year on year.

Over the past year, the national veterinary system earnestly organized and implemented the 2014 national compulsory immunization plan, monitoring and epidemiological investigation for major animal diseases, and effectively prevented and treated animal H7N9 influenza and common and frequently occurring diseases such as piglet diarrhea. At the same time, it strengthened veterinary health supervision and law enforcement, promoted the "National Animal Health Supervision 'Improve Quality, Strengthen Capacity' Action," and strengthened supervision over more than 1.24 million large-scale breeding farms (breeding communities) and nearly 15,000 slaughterhouses (slaughtering establishments). It implemented the "Measures for the Administration of Prescription and Non-prescription Veterinary Drugs," deepened "linkage between inspection and enforcement," severely cracked down on illegal acts involving veterinary drugs, and carried out an action to standardize the labels and instructions of veterinary drug products. All localities actively implemented the primary responsibility of pig slaughter enterprises, strengthened the quality and safety risk assessment of pig slaughtering, improved the quality and safety supervision mechanism of the slaughter industry, and severely cracked down on all kinds of illegal and criminal acts such as illegal slaughtering, slaughtering of dead livestock and poultry, and water injection or injection of other substances, and a total of 1,387 substandard designated pig slaughterhouses were cleaned up and closed, 3,386 illegal slaughter cases were investigated and handled, and 7.8 million samples were supervised and spot-tested for "lean meat powder" in the slaughter phase, effectively safeguarding the production safety of the breeding industry, the quality and safety of animal products, public health safety and ecological safety.