Li Ganjie, Vice Minister of SEPA, met with Kandeh K. Yumkella, the visiting Director General of UNIDO and his retinue on August 30. Mr. Li welcomed Mr. Yumkella's visit and said China was ready to cooperate with UNIDO to expand the areas of cooperation and contribute to protecting and improving China's environmental quality, promoting the implementation of international conventions, and protecting the environment around the world.

Over the past decade and more, the Administration and the Organization have conducted a wide range of useful cooperation and achieved considerable results, said Mr. Li. The Organization has given generous supports to China's environmental cause and played an important role in helping developing countries including China to implement Montreal Protocol, Stockholm Convention and other multilateral environmental agreements as well as in promoting sustainable development. Currently, China's environmental protection work has entered a new era when the economic growth can be optimized by environmental protection. The government put forward the milestone strategy of "three transformations", namely, to transform from emphasizing economic growth and neglecting environmental protection to paying equal attention to both; to transform from the fact that environmental protection lags behind economic development to making the former keep pace with the latter; and to transform from protecting the environment mainly by administrative approaches to solving environmental problems through a combination of legal, economic, technical and necessary administrative means. The three transformations are of instructive, strategic, and historical significance.

Mr. Li also gave good comments on the cooperation on eliminating ODS and POPs and put forward recommendations for further cooperation. He hoped that both sides could seek to establish a longstanding and steady mode of cooperation on the basis of the going project-level cooperation.

Mr. Yumkella fully recognized the fruitful bilateral cooperation on eliminating ODS and POPs and hoped to extend the areas of cooperation with the Administration and intensify it. Mr. Yumkella also hoped to cooperate in a wider scope with China on product quality, food safety, renewable energy, and so on.