Q&A: Interview with US health secretary
Updated: 2007-12-10 17:24
Li Xing: Could you give us a figure?
Michael Leavitt : Yes. About 2 trillion US dollars (worth of goods) a year is imported into the United States. It comes from about 800,000 different sources and is imported through nearly 300 different ports of entry. So you can see it ranges from food and drugs, but also automobiles, airplanes and there's virtually nothing now that isn't… or some component of it that is not manufactured outside the United States.
So we want to change our strategy rather than just trying to prevent things from coming in. We want to help other countries build quality into their products. So we've been meeting with the Chinese government, for example, saying if you want to produce goods for American consumers, and we want you to, then you need to do it in a way that meets our standards of safety and quality. Likewise, we want to sell products to Chinese citizens and we would expect to meet your standards of quality.
In order to accomplish that, we need to have our two systems work together more closely, and from that discussion came the negotiations between the Chinese government and the US. And tomorrow we will be signing some very important agreements between our two countries.
Li Xing: Let's talk about these agreements. Could you elaborate on the agreements and what you foresee these agreements will change things? Because you are talking about transformation.
Michael Leavitt : Yes. There are two agreements. The first deals with food and feed, and the second is on medical devices and drugs. I won't go into all the details, because they are long and complex, but essentially it commits both our countries to work on a collaborate basis to develop standards, so that products being developed in China for the US or the US for China meet our respective standards.
It also calls for us to build capacity so that our respective systems can work together on an interoperable basis; they may be different systems but we have common goals. And we have to build bridges and this agreement helps us do that.
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