Here
we go again...
Peter Wu
9 May 2011
An article I saw
in the New York Times today. Why do these incidents happen in China
again and again?
Do we not have
scruples? Does the want to make money completely over-ride the
most basic of our value system?
附文
In
China, Fear of Fake Eggs and ‘Recycled’ Buns
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
SHANGHAI — On a bustling corner near downtown Shanghai recently, some
shoppers avoided the steamed buns sold by Zhu Qinghe in a street-side
cubbyhole. Instead, they bought the packaged buns in the freezer
section of Hualian, a supermarket chain store in the same building.
Big mistake: Mr. Zhu’s buns were soft, tasty and fresh, made every day,
he said, at 3 a.m. The supermarket’s, on the other hand, came from a
filthy workshop where workers “recycled” buns after their sell-by date. The workers merely threw the stale buns into a vat, added
water and flour, and repackaged them to be sold anew.
It has been two years since China’s government, reeling from nationwide
outrage over melamine-contaminated baby milk that sickened 300,000 infants and
killed at least 6, declared food safety a national priority. Since then, it has threatened, raided and arrested throngs of
shady food processors — and even executed a couple.
But a stomach-turning string of food-safety scandals this spring, from
recycled buns to contaminated pork, makes it clear that official efforts are
falling short. Despite efforts to create a modern food-safety
regimen, oversight remains utterly haphazard, in the hands of ill-trained,
ill-equipped and outnumbered enforcers whose quick fixes are even more quickly
undone.
“Most of them are working like headless
chickens, having no clue what
are the major food-borne diseases that need to be addressed or what are the
major contaminants in the food process,” said Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, a food
safety expert with the World Health Organization’s Beijing office.
In recent weeks, China’s news media have reported sales of pork adulterated
with the drug clenbuterol, which can cause heart palpitations; pork sold as
beef after it was soaked in borax, a detergent additive; rice contaminated with
cadmium, a heavy metal discharged by smelters; arsenic-laced soy sauce; popcorn
and mushrooms treated with fluorescent bleach; bean sprouts tainted with an
animal antibiotic; and wine diluted with sugared water and chemicals.
Even eggs, seemingly sacrosanct in their shells, have turned out not to
be eggs at all but man-made concoctions of chemicals, gelatin and paraffin. Instructions can be purchased online, the Chinese
media reported.
Scandals are proliferating, in part, because producers operate in a
cutthroat environment in which illegal additives are everywhere and
cost-effective. Manufacturers calculate correctly that the odds of
profiting from unsafe practices far exceed the odds of getting caught, experts
say. China’s explosive growth has spawned nearly half a
million food producers, the authorities say, and four-fifths of them employ 10
or fewer workers, making oversight difficult.
China’s iron political controls ensure that no powerful consumer lobby
exists to agitate for reform, press lawsuits that punish wayward producers or
lobby the government to pay as much attention to consumer safety as it does to
controlling threats to its own power. Instead, like Alice after
falling through the rabbit hole, consumers must guess what their food and drink
contain.
“Basically, people now feel nothing is safe
to eat,” said Sang Liwei, who
directs the Beijing office of the Global Food Safety Forum, a private agency. “They don’t know what choices to make. They are really feeling very helpless.”
Chinese consumers may have their hands tied compared with their Western
counterparts, but they are increasingly middle-class, well-educated and
dismayed by their lack of protection. Even top officials are discomfited.
“All of these nasty cases of food-safety
problems are enough to show
that lack of integrity and moral decline have become a very serious problem,”
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told government officials in mid-April, according to
The People’s Daily.
“We feel really ashamed.” Vice Premier Wang
Qishan said at a meeting in
March with legislators, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. “Just when the people have enough to feed themselves,
we have this food-safety problem. Really
embarrassing, this is really embarrassing for us.”
Some progress is evident. China adopted a far-reaching food-safety law
in 2009 and is bringing hundreds of standards in line with international norms.
Already, nearly half of dairy food companies have been
ordered to halt production after failing to meet new licensing requirements.
“The situation is steadily improving,” said
Luo Yunbo, the dean of the
food sciences college at China Agricultural University in Beijing. “It is not as bad as people think it is.”
Nor is it good. The health minister, Chen Zhu, said in
February that China did not have enough enforcement agents, with fewer than one
food inspector for every 10,000 people. Instead of
systematically identifying the safety risks and forcing producers to prove that
they have eliminated them, said Dr. Ben Embarek of the World Health
Organization, Chinese inspectors follow a long-discredited strategy of randomly
sampling and testing products.
Some food is simply unregulated. Pork
accounts for two-thirds of the meat eaten by Chinese consumers, but only half
of it goes through slaughterhouses that are subject to inspection, he said. The rest comes from pigs slaughtered in backyards, villages
or markets and is essentially untested, he said.
Oversight remains shared among disparate bureaucracies: the Commerce
Ministry supervises pork slaughterhouses, Dr. Ben Embarek said, but beef and
poultry slaughterhouses fall under the Agriculture Ministry.
Even the government’s most dramatic crackdowns have fallen short. After the 2008 milk-powder scandal drew international attention,
the authorities ordered all melamine-tainted dairy products to be destroyed. But they have turned up again and again.
Last week, the police in Chongqing in southwestern China uncovered 26
tons of melamine-tainted milk powder at a factory that made ice cream bars, The
People’s Daily reported.
Clenbuterol is another recurring problem. According to the Chinese news
media, the drug was banned in animal feed nearly a decade ago because it can
cause heart palpitations and other health problems in humans.
But experts say it remains widely available. Many
farmers continue to feed it to pigs because it helps the animals develop more
muscle and less fat and allows them to be sold for slaughter more quickly.
Just last month, the Shuanghui Group, one of China’s largest meat
producers, recalled thousands of tons of meat and meat products after news
reports that a company affiliate had processed pork from pigs that were fed
clenbuterol.
Consumers have also been repeatedly poisoned by excessive levels of the
chemical nitrite in meat, Feng Ping, a professor at the Beijing Academy of Food
Sciences, told an international food-safety conference last month. The most recent suspected case occurred April 21 when
a 1-year-old Beijing girl died after eating fried chicken bought from an
outdoor vendor, a local newspaper reported.
How many others fall sick or die from contaminated food is anyone’s
guess because data on food-borne diseases is spotty at best. “We operate in the dark in many ways,” Dr. Ben Embarek
said.
Consumers are not the only victims. Unscrupulous
producers hurt reputable manufacturers. Imported
dairy products nearly quintupled in volume in 2009, the year after the melamine
scandal, government officials say. Foreign brands now account
for half of all infant milk powder sold in China. Now steamed
buns are taking a hit.
“I am no longer eating steamed buns,” a
65-year-old Shanghai man, who
gave his last name as Chen, declared in front of a supermarket window
emblazoned with the motto “No fake goods in Hualian.”
The supermarket chain and other retailers that have sold the buns have
blamed its supplier, the Shanghai Shenglu Food Company. The authorities have revoked the supplier’s license
and have arrested five of the firm’s managers, according to Chinese news media
reports.
But Mr. Chen is not reassured.
“None of them are reliable,” he spat. “They really have no morals. They will do anything for money.”