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MSNBC: Chinese flood U.S. markets with contaminated food products; most of
it gets throughÂ…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18729540/
What few contaminated products FDA discovers are often shipped again
By Rick Weiss
Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.
Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.
Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.
Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug
Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal,
along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements,
toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States
with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have
simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they
caught -- many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or
third attempt at entry.
Now the confluence of two events -- the highly publicized contamination of
U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this
week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China -- has
activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China
it is fed up.
Integral part of food chain
Dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove
difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become
so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm
the U.S. economy, too.
"So many U.S. companies are directly or indirectly involved in China now, the
commercial interest of the United States these days has become to allow imports
to come in as quickly and smoothly as possible," said Robert B. Cassidy, a
former assistant U.S. trade representative for China and now director of
international trade and services for Kelley Drye Collier Shannon, a Washington
law firm.
As a result, the United States finds itself "kowtowing to China," Cassidy
said, even as that country keeps sending American consumers adulterated and
mislabeled foods.
It's not just about cheap imports, added Carol Tucker Foreman, a former
assistant secretary of agriculture now at the Consumer Federation of America.
"Our farmers and food processors have drooled for years to be able to sell
their food to that massive market," Foreman said. "The Chinese counterfeit.
They have a serious piracy problem. But we put up with it because we want to
sell to them."
Risks of unregulated trade being re-evaluated
U.S. agricultural exports to China have grown to more than $5 billion a
year-- a fraction of last year's $232 billion U.S. trade deficit with China but
a number that has enormous growth potential, given the Chinese economy's 10
percent growth rate and its billion-plus consumers.
Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of
course, as evidenced by the many lawsuits that U.S. pet food companies now face
from angry consumers who say their pets were poisoned by tainted Chinese
ingredients. Until recently, however, many companies and even the federal
government reckoned that, on average, those risks were worth taking. And for
some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out
of business with its rock-bottom prices.
But after the pet food scandal, some are recalculating.
"This isn't the first time we've had an incident from a Chinese supplier,"
said Pat Verduin, a senior vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers
Association, a trade group in Washington. "Food safety is integral to brands
and to companies. This is not an issue the industry is taking lightly."
China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in
stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors:
Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not
approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with
nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as
"poisonous."
In the first four months of 2007, FDA inspectors -- who are able to check out
less than 1 percent of regulated imports -- refused 298 food shipments from
China. By contrast, 56 shipments from Canada were rejected, even though Canada
exports about $10 billion in FDA-regulated food and agricultural products to
the United States -- compared to about $2 billion from China.
Although China is subject to more inspections because of its poor record,
those figures mean that the rejection rate for foods imported from China, on a
dollar-for-dollar basis, is more than 25 times that for Canada.
Miao Changxia, of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said China "attaches
great importance" to the pet food debacle. "Investigations were immediately
carried out . . . and a host of emergency measures have been taken to ensure
the hygiene and safety of exported plant-origin protein products," she said in
an e-mail.
Meat pours into U.S. despite rules
But deception by Chinese exporters is not limited to plant products, and some
of their most egregiously unfit exports are smuggled into the United States.
Under Agriculture Department rules, countries cannot export meat and poultry
products to the United States unless the USDA certifies that the
slaughterhouses and processing plants have food-safety systems equivalent to
those here. Much to its frustration, China is not certified to sell any meat to
the United States because it has not met that requirement.
But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters. In the past year, USDA teams
have seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited poultry products from
China and other Asian countries, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced
in March. Some were shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower," "prune
slices" and "vegetables," according to news reports. It is unclear how much of
the illegal meat slipped in undetected.
Despite those violations, the Chinese government is on track to get
permission to legally export its chickens to the United States -- a prospect
that has raised concern not only because of fears of bacteria such as
salmonella but also because Chinese chickens, if not properly processed, could
be a source of avian flu, which public-health authorities fear may be poised to
trigger a human pandemic.
Last year, under high-level pressure from China, the USDA passed a rule
allowing China to export to the United States chickens that were grown and
slaughtered in North America and then processed in China -- a rule that quickly
passed through multiple levels of review and was approved the day before
Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington last April.
Chinese birds flying to market?
Now the rule that China really wants, allowing it to export its own birds to
the United States, is in the works, said Richard Raymond, USDA's undersecretary
for food safety. Reports in China have repeatedly hinted that only if China
gets its way on chicken exports to the United States will Beijing lift its
four-year-old ban on importing U.S. beef. Raymond denies any link.
"It's not being facilitated or accelerated through the system at all,"
Raymond said of the chicken rule, adding that permission for China to sell
poultry to the United States is moving ahead because recent USDA audits found
China's poultry slaughterhouses to be equivalent to those here.
Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a Washington advocacy group,
said that finding -- which is not subject to outside review -- is unbelievable,
given repeated findings of unsanitary conditions at China's chicken
slaughterhouses. Corbo said he has seen some of those audits. "Everyone who has
seen them was grossed out," he said.
An official response
The Cabinet-level "strategic economic dialogue" with China, which began in
September and is scheduled to resume on Wednesday, was described early on as a
chance for the United States and China to break a longstanding stalemate on
trade issues. When it comes to the safety of imported foods, though, they may
highlight the limited leverage that the United States currently has.
It is not just that food from China is cheap, said William Hubbard, a former
associate director of the FDA. For a growing number of important food products,
China has become virtually the only source in the world.
China now controls 80 percent of the world's production of ascorbic acid, for
example, a valuable preservative that is ubiquitous in processed and other
foods. Only one producer still makes it in the United States, Hubbard said.
"That's true of a lot of ingredients," he said, including the wheat gluten
that was initially thought to be the cause of the pet deaths. Virtually none of
it is made any longer in the United States, because the Chinese sell it for
less than it would cost U.S. manufacturers to make it.
So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the
executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists
to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods.
"Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations," said Caroline
Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public
Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as "current
thinking on a particular subject," are not binding.
Tough talk, but actions questioned
Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed
regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the
White House Office of Management and Budget.
Andrea Wuebker, an OMB spokeswoman, said that the office reviewed 600
proposed rules last year and that it is up to agencies to finalize rules after
they are reviewed. She did not tally how many reviews sent agencies'
rule-writers back to the drawing board. She noted that some food safety rules
have been finalized, including some related to mad cow disease and
bioterrorism. Critics point out that the bioterrorism-related regulations were
required by an act of Congress.
John C. Bailar III, a University of Chicago professor emeritus who chaired a
2003 National Academies committee that recommended major changes in the U.S.
food safety system -- which have gone largely unheeded -- said he has become
increasingly concerned that corporations and the federal government seem
willing to put the interests of business "above the public welfare."
"This nation has -- and has had for decades -- a pressing need for a wholly
dedicated food safety agency, one that is independent and not concerned with
other matters . . . to bring together and extend the bits of food safety
activities now scattered over more than a dozen agencies," he said in an e-mail.
Legislation to create such an agency was recently introduced, though many
suspect that is too big a challenge politically.
But in the aftermath of the recent food scandals, a growing number of
companies and trade groups, including Grocery Manufacturers of America, are
speaking in favor of at least a little more protection, starting with a
doubling of the FDA's food safety budget.
China is talking tough, too. "Violations of the rules on the use and addition
of chemicals or other banned substances will be dealt with severely," said
Miao, of the Chinese Embassy.
It is a threat some doubt will be enforced with great vigor, but nonetheless
it reveals that China recognizes that the latest scandal has shortened
Americans' fuses.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
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