Initial testing has found no poisonous vegetables in Beijing, and the result of more comprehensive testing by Beijing's quality testing centre has yet to be known.

China Central Television (CCTV) news said on Sunday that vegetables contaminated with pesticides might have entered Beijing from some production bases in Zhangjiakou, North China's Hebei Province.

The report said vegetables from Zhangjiakou, labelled "pollution-free," were sent daily to more than 20 cities across the country, including Beijing.

The Beijing bureau for industry and commerce, the watchdog of local markets, has conducted tests on produce from large vegetable markets in the capital and has not found any poisonous vegetables, according to reports from the Beijing Youth Daily.

A source with the bureau's information centre said the testing is ongoing and the samples of 26 kinds of vegetables from Zhangbei County, one of the Zhangjiakou bases of vegetable production are being tested at the Beijing quality testing centre.

"The test results have not come out yet," he said.

The bureau is taking urgent measures to prevent poisonous vegetables from making their ways into Beijing, including an inspection of the vegetable production base in Zhangjiakou, the Beijing Youth Daily reported.

Meanwhile, the Shanghai Morning Post reported that in Shanghai, although vegetables from Hebei were not found containing pesticide residue, those from other places were.

At the Cao'anlu market, the largest one for vegetable wholesalers in Shanghai, five out of 10 types of vegetables were found to contain organic phosphor, a sort of pesticide, according to a report which quoted the latest results of testing in the market.

But local residents can feel safe buying vegetables in Shanghai, as long as they pay attention to such notices, testing office of Cao'anlu market representative Gu Yungen was quoted as saying.

He added that there are testing offices in all of the seven major vegetable wholesale markets in Shanghai, which makes the effective supervision over vegetables possible.

In another development at the Linjiangmen Market, the first market in the Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality to sell vegetables labelled "pollution-free," vendors no longer sell such vegetables, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Vegetables labelled "pollution-free" are more expensive than those without the classification and do not look as fresh, explained a vendor with the surname Chen. "Besides, no one believes that such vegetables are pollution-free," she added.

Deng Zhansong, former manager of the market, attributed the failure to a lack of promotion of pollution-free vegetables, Xinhua said.

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