Blue stilton may never replace stinky bean curd as one of the country's best-loved lunchtime snacks, but new European Union initiatives want Chinese to buy European to shore up its status as the world's leading exporter of food and beverages.

EU officials announced a series of measures yesterday in Shanghai to promote exports of European food and beverages as the bloc recognized China as a key future market.

With the aid of its "Tasty Europe" campaign and with trade talks in Brussels slated for next month, the EU has set a target of 15 percent growth in food exports to China over the next several years.

"The food sector is globally less affected by the economic crisis than other sectors," said Raimondo Serra, counselor for agricultural affairs of the EU delegation to China.

"We may experience, in some sectors, a comeback to a focus on domestic products, but it's not going to reverse current trends for the simple reason that people need to be fed, and the current patterns are integrated and globalized," he added.

EU exports of agricultural and food products to China stood at 1.6 billion euros (US$2.2 billion) last year, a jump of 82 percent from 2004. Serra said the next two years were expected to at least match last year's annualized growth rate of 15 percent.

Although food accounts for less than 2 percent of the EU's total exports to China, the union has watched its share of global food and beverage exports slide from 24.2 percent to 20.8 percent over the last decade.

This has pressed it into battle with emerging rivals like Australia, now mulling a free trade agreement with China, and New Zealand, which launched an FTA with China in October.

Serra said a China-EU FTA was not in the cards. "It's very complex," he said.

The EU's latest promotional blitz intends to raise the 27-member bloc's profile at next month's SIAL China 2009 fair, Asia's No 1 food fair, taking place in Shanghai, as well as at cash-and-carry chain Metro.

From May 18 to June 3, Metro customers nationwide will be deluged with bright blue and yellow signs bearing the "Tasty Europe" logo as they are enticed to taste foreign products between buying diapers, rice and green tea.

Housewife Guo Yan, who buys imported goods two or three times a week at City Store in downtown Shanghai, was suspicious of the planned campaign but claimed that European products already have a positive image in China.

"These days I buy more according to need than fancy because of the economic downturn," she said. "I think we tend to see European products as being more natural, less processed than US goods. But if I saw that campaign, I wouldn't trust that the price reflected the actual quality of the goods."

City Store branch manager He Fengfeng said most of the products at her Shanghai CBD store, which specializes in imported goods, were European, but that she saw little difference between European, American or Australian goods.

Editor: Yan