China is the main source of risky products in Europe and toys are the item most commonly found to pose a risk to consumers, the European Commission said Thursday. More than half of all dangerous products detected last year by EU authorities originated in China, with notifications for some 700 goods, according to the European Union's executive arm. With 80 percent of all toys sold in the EU made in China, toys were the product most often found to pose a serious risk, the commission said in an annual report on its so-called RAPEX system for detecting risky goods. The commission put the poor safety record of Chinese goods down to the sheer number of imports from the country and the fact that European authorities have ramped up monitoring after waves of recalls of Chinese-made toys last year. EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva said pressure on China to clean up its act, which included a threat of banning dangerous goods, had borne fruit although Beijing needed to take further action. “While we have made real progress with China, there is a lot more to be done,” she told journalists in Brussels. “I believe that the Chinese government has realized the importance of product safety and of protecting the ‘made in China' brand,” she said. “I believe our current cooperation with China has yielded encouraging results.” Tens of millions of Chinese-made toys were recalled in 2007 in what flared up into a new flash point in trade relations between the new economic giant and Europe and the United States. The world's largest toy maker, US company Mattel, recalled millions of Chinese-made toys deemed to be unsafe although it later admitted that many of the problems were due to design, rather than manufacturing, flaws. __
