Brussels, March 13 (IANS) Trade in counterfeit goods is booming in the European Union and about 80 percent of fake goods that enter its market are from China, the EU Commission president has said. Addressing the Global Anti-Counterfeit Summit in Brussels Monday, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said that EU customs officials seized more than 128 million counterfeit and pirated goods in 2006, up 70 percent from 2005, EuAsiaNews reported.

Some 80 percent of the counterfeit goods intercepted while en route to the EU, were made in China, he stressed.

“Unless we successfully engage China, then everything else we do is a mere side-show,” Barroso told the conference in his keynote address as head of the EU’s executive arm, which shares responsibility with the EU countries for keeping counterfeit and pirated goods out of the bloc.

For the head of the EU’s executive arm there is “an increasingly worrying - even frightening - trend: the high price consumers pay when they buy fake goods,” he noted.

“Counterfeiting is now taking place on an industrial scale,” he underlined and added that some fakes require technical expertise to identify them, they are so convincing.

Counterfeiting has moved well beyond T-shirts and other garments. Fakes today include toys, foodstuffs, electrical appliances, medicines and even parts for motor vehicles and aircraft, Borroso pointed out.

Emphasising that the fake goods trade will continue as long as consumers are not able understand the problem. Hence, the importance of consumer education, highlighting the risks to consumers’ health and safety should be taken seriously.

The Global Anti-Counterfeiting Summit was organized by the Authentics Foundation, an international non-governmental organization that seeks to raise public awareness of the negative aspects of counterfeit marketing.