This is the tip of a horrendous iceberg

The FDA refused 257 shipments from China in April. Here is what they included.

-- Pesticides in frozen eel, ginseng, and frozen red raspberry crumble
-- Banned antibiotics in frozen catfish
-- Sardines and scallops “coated with putrifying bacteria”
-- Monkfish containing the deadly toxin tetrodotoxin
-- Most commonly, simply “filth”, a generic term for decomposition and gross contamination, which FDA agents found in salted bean curd cubes in brine with chili and sesame oil, dried apple, dried peach, dried pear, dried round bean curd, dried mushroom, olives, frozen bay scallops, frozen Pacific cod, sardines, frozen seafood mix, and fermented bean curd

More recently,
-- Toothpaste laced with deadly diethylene glycol
-- Dog and cat food containing fatal melamine

In the past year, the FDA rejected more than twice as many food shipments from China as from all other countries combined.

The FDA inspects about 1% of imported goods. The remaining 99% of the above products and others like them made it safely into the US and into your home.

Source:

by Zapata (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 3 comments) on Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 11:04:16 AM
 

To Shvoss

Thank you very much for your input of good information.  There is a deep cultural problem in China, in my estimation (and I have lived among the Chinese) that encourages what we would consider cheating the other guy.  Nothing is as it seems.  Looks like, smells like but not what you ordered.  Most of the time.

by John E. Carey (207 articles, 0 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 106 comments) on Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 11:39:26 AM
 

It gets worse

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 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."
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. ...

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. ...

"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 U.S., 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.
Source:

by Zapata (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 3 comments) on Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 11:08:04 AM
 

It does get worse....

Thanks again for your great info.  Everyone should become more aware.  My friend Mort Kondracke says that China should be the number one issue in 2008.

 Please email comments and input to jecarey2603@cox.net

Challenge of China Deserves to Become Top Issue in 2008

by John E. Carey (207 articles, 0 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 106 comments) on Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 2:04:37 PM