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High-Tech Aims for Olympic Food Safety

Embarrassed by recent scandals over the safety of Chinese food products, organizing officials for next year's Beijing Olympics spelled out high-tech plans Monday to make sure healthy food is delivered to the 10,500 athletes who will reside in the Olympic Village.

The move comes just two days before Beijing marks the one-year-away date for the start of the 2008 Summer Games, highlighted by a gigantic stage show in Tiananmen Square.

"We are very confident about ensuring food safety in Beijing," said Wang Wei, an executive vice president of the Beijing organizing committee. "Actually, Beijing has hosted a lot big events and there have been no problems regarding food safety in these events."

China will use Global positioning satellites to help oversee food production, processing factories and food hygiene, Wang said.

"All food entering the Olympic Village and other facilities will be given an Olympic food safety logistics code," Wang said. "Also, the food transportation vehicles will be globally positioned and tracked. The whole process will be monitored from the start of production through transportation to the end users," he said without elaborating.

Although most athletes will eat specialized diets provided by their own team officials, Olympic organizers have also promised to test food samples on mice, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported recently.

Wang said extra measures would also be taken to ensure "food safety for the general public."

"During the games some special monitoring mechanisms will also be applied to monitor restaurants and public food sellers to let people know how they can buy safe food," Wang said.

Questions over the safety of Chinese products arose earlier this year when a Chinese-made pet food ingredient was linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in North America. Since then, Chinese goods ranging from toothpaste to tires have been banned or recalled in numerous countries.

The U.S. also has blocked imports of five types of farmed seafood from China that were found to contain unapproved drugs.

In a separate development Monday, the Beijing-based Qianxihe Food Group, an Olympic sponsor, said it has begun selling a hormone-free line of pork for the Games, a company official said.

The company's pigs have been fed food without hormones and are part of the "Olympics Special Supply Pork" range, which will be consumed by athletes and can be bought in supermarkets by ordinary citizens, said the official, who would give only her surname Tong.

Last month, China announced it was taking steps to ensure athletes' food is safe and free of substances that could trigger a positive result in tests for banned performance-enhancing drugs.

Helicopters drop food to 2 million

LUCKNOW, India - Helicopters dropped food to almost 2 million marooned Indian villagers on Saturday as the death toll from unusually heavy monsoon rains and floods in South Asia rose to more than 225.

The food drops to 2,200 villages cut off by flooding aimed to help desperate residents in the worst-hit eastern parts of India's Uttar Pradesh state. Umesh Sinha, the state relief commissioner, also said nearly 280,000 acres of rice paddy crops had been destroyed.

In India's northeastern Assam state, flooding forced rhinos from their habitat at the Kaziranga National Park and their panicked charges killed one person and injured two others, wildlife officials said.

At least 229 people have been killed in India and neighboring Bangladesh, and 19 million driven from their homes in recent days. The South Asian monsoon season runs from June to September as the rains work their way across the subcontinent, a deluge that scatters floods and landslides across the region and kills hundreds of people every year.

The number of dead in Bangladesh rose to 81 Saturday, up from 65 a day earlier, the country's information ministry said. Raging floodwaters have battered 38 out of 64 districts in the delta nation of 145 million people.

Fakhruddin Ahmed, head of Bangladesh's military-backed interim government, visited the northwestern district of Sirajganj on Saturday. Despite the devastation, he said the government had enough food and medicine to distribute and foreign assistance wasn't yet needed.

One person looking for that help was 45-year-old Aleya Begum, who took shelter on an embankment with more than 50 other families after their homes washed away in Pabna, 75 miles north of the capital, Dhaka.

She said the group was short of drinking water.

"I've lost everything. We need help from the government to survive," Begum said.

Low-lying areas around Dhaka were under neck-deep water, and many residents were using boats to travel around. Government meteorologists said water levels in Dhaka continued to rise.

Flooded rivers started to recede Saturday in the Indian state of Assam — but there was no such respite in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states.

Mayawati, Uttar Pradesh's top elected official, said India and neighboring Nepal had signed a treaty in 1996 to solve the annual flooding by building dams and hydropower projects, but the projects have not yet begun.

"The federal government has turned a blind eye to the recurring floods in the state," said Mayawati, who uses one name.

In Uttar Pradesh, flooding deaths came in all shapes and sizes: Two villagers were killed when a house collapsed, two children were swept away by floodwaters, and one person was killed by a snake bite.

With hundreds of farming villages submerged along the southern edge of the Himalayas, people took refuge wherever they could. Women and children were spotted screaming for help as they perched in treetops in Uttar Pradesh.

So far this year, some 14 million people in India and 5 million in Bangladesh have been displaced by flooding, according to government figures.