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COUNTRY CORNER Steve Fairchild, editor
China needs a lesson from American Consumers
There can’t be a better training ground for cynicism than the world of international trade. In June, Chinese officials rejected a shipment of U.S. raisins on grounds that the fruit contained levels of sulfur dioxide surpassing Chinese government allowances. Sulfur dioxide is used to preserve dry fruit. The fruit in question was destroyed, and at the time, the Chinese offered no further details.
By the time I got around to the story, I couldn’t find official word from the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, China’s import safety bureaucracy. But both AP and Reuters reported the Chinese inspection administration had sent the following to its lesser and subsidiary offices: “The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine asks all local departments to increase quarantine examinations of foods imported from the United States.”
Just weeks earlier, the same inspection administration turned away some 118 tons of Evian mineral water from the French food company, Danone. The water was said to have unacceptable levels of bacteria. Diplomatically, a representative from Danone said it was a difference in understanding about safety.
China’s discovery of imported food products that don’t meet its “sanitary standards” come conspicuously after a string of damning contaminations among Chinese imports to the United States and other countries.
One consumer group calls it the Chinese Poison Train, which started a rather grand news cycle in early 2007. First came vegetable proteins contaminated with melamine, a byproduct of coal. The contaminated ingredients moved into the pet food chain and started to rip through the kidneys of family pets and livestock in the United States. That’s bad public relations by any measure, but it was just the beginning.
Then there was the puffer fish, which is potentially poisonous, mislabeled as monkfish. Then came Thomas the Train toys painted with lead paint. There are 450,000 Chinese-made tires now under recall for poor manufacturing. And if you’ve gone on a bargain binge for toothpaste, you might have a tube of Chinese-made stuff that contains diethylene glycol (read antifreeze).
Most recently, our FDA has turned off imports of Chinese farm-raised catfish. The agency has repeatedly found the fish contain low levels of the antimicrobials nitrofuran, malachite green, gentian violet and fluoroquinolone. The first three compounds are carcinogenic. And fluoroquinolone is an important class of human antibiotic, which the FDA fears could suffer from resistance if subclinical dosage is ingested through food animals.
American consumers should carefully consider the implications of buying food from a country that either has little control and safety oversight of its industry or wields control with dubious intent.
The cynics with front line experience in international trade with all its tit-for-tat grand standing, punitive trade deals and economic brinkmanship will snicker at such a grass-roots call for vigilance, but I for one put down a can of Mandarin oranges the other day because, across four brands, I couldn’t find a can that didn’t originate from China.
It’s a fool’s errand to boycott China, but we in agriculture should remind our fellow consumers there are alternatives. Mandarin oranges are grown domestically at some level. And farm-raised catfish is grown right here in the Midwest. When it comes to Chinese food imports, we should give Beijing a lesson in the economics of democracy and vote with our pocketbooks.
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