"This is a scandal that is growing bigger and worsening every day," Johannes Remmel, agriculture minister in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) daily.
China announced the ban, effective immediately, a day after authorities ordered the slaughter of 140 pigs at a German farm following the discovery of dangerous dioxin levels in pork for the first time since the scandal broke last week.
It banned imports of "German-produced edible pork and egg products," the country's product safety watchdog said in a statement, saying the move was aimed at safeguarding the health of Chinese consumers.
Chinese authorities also said they would inspect goods shipped from Germany prior to Tuesday and would release them only if they were found to be safe. Germany exported 7,000 tonnes of pork to China in 2009, the German government said, worth some €6 million ($8 million).
Previously only South Korea had banned German pork imports, while Slovakia had halted sales of German eggs and poultry meat, despite Berlin's repeated assurances there was no immediate risk to human health.
The scare began last week when it emerged that a German firm may have supplied some 3,000 tonnes of fatty acids only meant for industrial uses to makers of animal feed late last year. The feed was then widely distributed.
There are also indications that the firm, Harles & Jentzsch, has been selling the contaminated fatty acids since last March, a Schleswig-Holstein Agriculture Ministry spokesman told Wednesday's Westfalen-Blatt daily.
The company, which is under criminal investigation, filed for insolvency
Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the regional court in the western town of Itzehoe
said.
With eggs found to have high levels of dioxin, which can cause cancer in high doses, authorities destroyed 100,000 eggs last week and banned almost 5,000 poultry and pigs farms from selling produce while tests were conducted.
Most of these farms have been since been given the all-clear, with just 412 still subject to the lockdown as of late Tuesday, according to the agriculture ministry in Berlin. Only three chickens were confirmed to be contaminated.
But on Tuesday authorities said that pork with high levels of dioxin had been discovered at a farm in the state of Lower Saxony, and that pork originating from animals slaughtered prior to the farm being banned from selling may be in shops.
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