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2 China's poisonous
exports By Drew Thompson
The April upsurge in the deaths of cats
and dogs in the United States alerted authorities
to an emerging health situation that was
ultimately determined to have been caused by pet
food contaminated by imported wheat and rice
gluten intentionally spiked with chemicals from
China.
Aside from causing the deaths of
household pets, contaminated byproducts of the
adulterated pet food entered the human food chain
as animal feed, affecting 20 million chickens,
56,000 pigs
and
unknown numbers of fish in North America. While
there appears to be no risk to human health in
this case, the incident exposes a nascent threat
to health stemming from the increased trade in
Chinese foodstuffs as well as the capabilities and
limits of US monitoring capacity.
Food
safety and defense are important elements of
global health governance. China and the United
States share a common interest in ensuring the
safety and security of the global food chain. The
US government has increased its commitment to
"food defense", as established in the Bioterrorism
Act of 2002, but recent incidents have established
that increased monitoring capacity at home is
necessary to prevent adulterated products from
being imported and entering the food chain.
Increasing domestic budgets and working closely
with trading partners, particularly large volume
partners like China, will help reduce future
incidents.
Chinese and international
media reports routinely expose the damage caused
by counterfeit and adulterated foodstuffs. Since
the transition to a market economy, Chinese
farmers have increasingly used dangerous or
illegal pesticides and fertilizers to increase
yields, used improper antibiotics and hormones to
improve livestock and fish growth and employed
illegal preservatives to increase marketability
of semi-processed products. In a highly
publicized 2004 tragedy, 13 babies died in Fuyang, Anhui
province, from fake milk powder that had virtually
no nutritional value.
Hundreds in Panama
have died from an additive, diethylene glycol,
which was added to cough syrup. Toothpaste
manufactured by a Chinese company and exported to
Panama and Australia is suspected of containing
the same ingredient and is currently being
recalled. In addition to the discovery of
adulterated pet food ingredients in the United
States, US Customs officials have discovered and
embargoed numerous shipments of foodstuffs from
China that are filthy or contaminated with banned
chemicals. From the production standpoint, these
incidents reflect two things: poor manufacturing
practices due to the producers' efforts to
increase profits at the expense of safety and the
Chinese government's inability to effectively
regulate a decentralized production base.
Oversight of China's large
and decentralized food processing and
distribution industry is the responsibility of 10
government departments, particularly the State Food and
Drug Agency (SFDA). Yet responsibility for food
safety is shared by departments within the Ministry
of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, local
animal-husbandry departments, industry commerce bureaus,
and the Administration of Quality Supervision,
Inspection and Quarantine. Overlapping
jurisdictions, weak legislation, a predominance of
cottage-industry production with little or no
documentation and growing access to international
markets is combining to create a significant
challenge for China's regulators and trading
partners.
Improved rural communications in
China coupled with the liberalization and growth
of global trade means that smaller, rural
producers in China now have greater direct or
indirect access to overseas markets. There are an
estimated 1 million food processing operations in
China, with as many as 70% of them as family
businesses with fewer than 10 employees.
Animal
husbandry, in particular, is dominated by rural
households. As globalization advances and China is
increasingly integrated economically with the
world, its government faces the progressively more
complex task of enforcing international standards
on a still relatively isolated rural production
base. As these small, often rural producers'
products increasingly gain access to the global
market, their potentially poor manufacturing
practices present a global health governance
challenge to governments tasked with protecting
the health of their citizens.
While counterfeit and contaminated foodstuffs are
not new phenomena in China, the US government,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and
importers will be forced to address this
relatively new and growing problem.
China's food-processing
challenges Chinese regulators tasked with
overseeing food safety face numerous challenges
ensuring that Chinese products are safe for
consumption. Environmental, structural and
political factors all contribute to these
challenges.
Environmental pollution poses a
significant problem for food processors and the regulators
that oversee their output. Access to clean
water is a particular concern. Even the famed
Maotai brand liquor has been threatened as
its water supply, the Chishui River, becomes
increasingly polluted. Processors must take
precautions to ensure their products are not
inadvertently contaminated by heavy metals,
bacteria, fertilizers and other chemicals from
water used in processing.
While
the Chinese government plays a dominant role in
regulating food and pharmaceutical production, it
has had limited success in establishing a culture
of safety in the industry and ensuring that
unlicensed and unqualified processors and their
products do not enter the market. The government,
in particular, is unprepared to address food
safety proactively when many producers are little
more than cottage processors. Small processors
often lack appropriate documentation and rarely
have the technical capacity to ensure compliance
with regulations.
Worst of all, small producers
often see government oversight as capricious and
corrupt, and spend more energy trying to outwit
officials than "buying in" and focusing on
compliance and good manufacturing practices.
The government's task is made even tougher
by the widespread corruption at multiple levels.
Local officials often collude with local
companies, stymieing attempts by higher-level
authorities to enforce safety regulations. At the
highest level, the SFDA in China has been racked
by a corruption scandal involving its founding
director, which has extended to more than 60 people as
well as provincial food and drug administrations.
Unscrupulous food and drug producers were
able to buy various licenses from the national
agency and its provincial and local branches. The
astonishing scope of the administration's
inability to effectively monitor the industry was
revealed when the government reported in 2005 that
they had discovered 114,000 unlicensed drug
manufacturers and demolished 461 offending
factories.
Companies that had been issued
Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certificates
were later found to be shipping unsafe products.
The Chinese government has promised to "clean
house". Premier Wen Jiabao and other senior
leaders have publicly vilified corrupt SFDA
officials, and the Supreme People's Court recently
sentenced the former director to death.
While government departments intone
that they take food safety seriously, they have
been unable to oversee the food and drug
industry effectively and reduce incidents. They are
further hampered by the lack of strong consumer-protection
laws and independent courts that place consumer
protection above local economic and political
interests. Additionally, China lacks a robust
civil society that collectively represents the
interests of
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