Responding to reports that the outbreak could be sourced to smuggled meat from the Far East, a spokesman for the ministry insisted China was not to blame and had recorded no cases of the disease for two years.

"It is unreasonable to blame China for the outbreak because European countries don't import meat and meat products from China," a ministry spokesman said.

At present there were no reported incidents of foot-and-mouth disease in China, while strict quarantine procedures were ensuring that no infected animals, if found, could be either imported or exported, he said.

Customs administrations at all levels in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have stepped up enforcement of the import ban on cloven-footed animals from neighbouring Mongolia to ensure there is no risk of transmitting foot-and-mouth disease, he said.

"You can't blame China for that (epidemic outbreak). If you don't have any proof then it is no good to go pointing fingers," he said.

He also denied that outbreaks in Taiwan and Hong Kong were caused by infected Chinese animals or meat products. "A lot of Asian countries are infected with foot-and-mouth disease. There is no direct proof that it came from China, no research directly linking it to China," he said.

Liu Zhiren, a leading researcher at China's Agricultural Economy Research Center, said foot-and-mouth disease had been a major problem for Chinese farmers in the past.

But he said that since the 1970s the disease had been "basically eradicated". "If an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease occurs in China, this will be a very big problem, it will be bigger in scale than the outbreak in Europe, or in Japan, South Korea or Taiwan because the scale of our livestock breeding is bigger," Liu said.

(China Daily 03/28/2001)