Chinese import woes

[styky]

Tainted food exposes Chinese import woes
What few contaminated products FDA discovers are often shipped again
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....<a href=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18729540/>full story</a>

[Right-Wingnut]

Here's an article that I added to a thread on WMD last week but it relates to this topic as well.

We are being poisoned by that ruthless gang of communist dictators bent on world dominion, and for whom life, especially that of anybody beneath them or foreign to them, is less than cheap.

It's bad enough that we import shoes, TV's, cars, electric drills and just about every damned thing you can find in a Walmart or dollar store from them.

Most of us were appalled to learn of the recent tainted pet food scandal and could only hope that our governments were preventing the importation of substandard food into the human food chain.

A few weeks ago, I tossed in a link to an article on tainted Chinese ingredients that were being fed to fish in North American fish farms. And guess who's eating those fish.

Now we have the real story. It's not just a few isolated cases. It's not just animal food.

It's time to rise up in total disgust and demand that the governments of the free world ban totally the import of any foodstuffs from China PERIOD.

They do not deserve our respect in any capacity. It was bad enough to have recognized them diplomatically and accepted them into the toothless UN. To trade with them in any way is folly - especially when the playing field is ridiculously lop-sided.

We now export our jobs to them in frightening numbers.

And all the while they are poisoning us by the inch ( oops, sorry Pierre, lost my head there, BY THE 2.54 CENTIMETRES [2,54 in Quebec where a period is a comma and a comma is a period, just like it is in mother France, n'est-ce pas?] ).

This is way beyond scary !!!

source: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/215857

Food Safety

TheStar.com - News -
The trouble on the world's farm

The melamine scandal is just the most notorious in a long string of ongoing problems that China faces
Should Canada be tougher on harmful produce from China?
May 20, 2007 04:30 AM
Andrew Chung
Staff Reporter

It's often said that China has become the world's factory. If you want to know how it's also becoming the world's farm, take a look inside the frenetic Ontario Food Terminal in Toronto on any given weekday morning.

Vic Carnevale points to the piled-up cases of garlic. On the right side they're from Mexico. On the left, from China. "Those are $55 a case," Carnevale, president of Veg-Pak Product Ltd., a vegetable wholesaler at the terminal, says of the Mexican garlic. Then he points to the left. "Those? $13."

"See those (Chinese) peas?" he continues, dodging hurried buyers in the aisle. "Ten dollars a case. In Canada you couldn't do it for that price if everybody worked for free!"

Every year Carnevale gets more and more fresh produce from China. In the span of just a few years, China has become one of the world's biggest exporters of food. It has become the leading exporter of fruits and vegetables, food additives and ingredients.

"They're coming on stronger and stronger," Carnevale says. "They're going to take over."

Even as this is happening, the safety of food from China is increasingly becoming an issue. The recent pet food scandal crystallized these fears after thousands of North American cats and dogs fell ill –the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has so far confirmed 16 deaths – from pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the plastics-related chemical melamine.

But the melamine scandal is just the most notorious in a long string of ongoing problems that China faces. They include overuse of highly toxic pesticides and fertilizers to boost yields, improper use of animal drugs, fraud and corruption. And as Western countries are finding out – from fish pumped full of antibiotics to filthy seafood – China is exporting these problems abroad.

Tomorrow, the World Health Organization will release a major report on the safety of China's food system and make recommendations on how to fix it. The Star has learned that much of it will focus on China's convoluted regulatory framework, loose laws and lack of monitoring.

"In a big country like China there are major challenges," says Dr. Henk Bekedam, the WHO's representative in that country, in an interview from Beijing.

Bekedam told the Star his report, in conjunction with China's State Food and Drug Administration and the Asian Development Bank, will cite issues including the following:

* There are "plenty" of laws on food safety, but no overall law or unified standard.

* There are at least nine ministries involved in the issue, as well as other agencies, none of which has authority over the others. Co-ordination is lacking among the ministries.

* Suppliers are not properly certified in the food chain.

* The system isn't adequately monitored on a regular basis.

The last point speaks to the melamine scandal, Bekedam says. Since the product wasn't monitored during key points in its manufacture, it would be impossible to test for it in the end product "because you never thought" to test for it.

In spite of such problems, Canada's federal food inspection agency is not treating food from China any differently from that of any other country. Some wonder whether Canada should focus more heavily on individual countries exporting goods to our doorsteps, instead of just goods themselves.

"We need to improve our ability to track food back to its source," says Mansel Griffiths, director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the University of Guelph. "This is all related to insuring a safer food supply."

Primarily because of low costs, but also longer growing seasons, Canada has joined many other Western nations in relying increasingly on China for its food supply.

Food imports from China have exploded over the past decade, rising nearly 300 per cent to more than $705 million last year, according to Statistics Canada. About half of that is fresh fruits and vegetables, of which China is now this country's fifth largest supplier. Another big category is fish and seafood.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says it has no issue with China, and that it ensures the safety of Canada's food supply by assessing the risk of each type of food, not the country from which it originates.

"We focus on the risk of the product," says Paul Mayers, executive director of the agency's animal products directorate. "Whether it's eggs or protein concentrates, it doesn't matter what country it comes from. A risk is a risk is a risk. The perspective we see in terms of food from China is that these products continue to be safe for consumers and continue to meet Canadian requirements."

Mayers questions how one would compare one country to another in terms of food safety. "Internationally there is no benchmarking to suggest the food in one country is significantly riskier than food from another country," he says.

South of the border, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration readily compiles data that suggest otherwise.

Over the past year, the data show that China has consistently had the most shipment rejections of any country. Last month, China had 257 rejections. The next highest were Mexico and India, with 140 and 122, respectively.

The rejections – captured even though a mere 1 per cent of all shipments are inspected in the U.S. – were for everything from filthy salted bean cubes to unsafe colourants in jujubes, from dangerous additives, such as dulcin (a sweetener believed to be carcinogenic) in dried fruit and nitrofuran (an antibiotic banned in Canada) in breaded shrimp, to banned drugs in all sorts of fish.

Canada does not compile data in this manner, and the inspection agency says it cannot make direct comparisons. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency couldn't say how many officers do international inspections, which are carried out not at the border ports themselves but at inland transfer stations.

Officers do random inspections, but also closely scrutinize exporters who have been placed on a surveillance list based on past transgressions for quality, chemical residue or microbial hazards.

Canada imports all sorts of food from China. In some cases it comes from Chinese companies. In others, Canadian companies may grow the food in China and ship it back here.

Aside from garlic and peas, there's also ginger, tomatoes, water chestnuts, the edible root burdock, apples, oranges, exotic fruits like loquat or pomelo, fish, seafood, cereals, fruit juices, nuts, tea and candy. The only meat imported is canned pork and sausage casings.

Canada's inspection agency examines all meat, regardless of its origin. The agency could not say how much of the fruit and vegetables it looks at overall. But a report from fiscal year 2004-05, the latest available, says the agency took 1,369 samples from Chinese produce for chemical residue, and 23 were in violation. Also, 3 per cent were rejected for microbes. There was no information on rejection for quality problems such as filth.

With fish, the agency says it places more scrutiny on items from China and Southeast Asia because of past problems with antibiotic residue. So last year, 25 per cent of shipments were inspected, and 12 per cent of shipments from China were in violation. Also, 3 per cent had microbial contamination. Again, there's no information on rejections for quality.

Some experts think Canada has much to gain by doing more food investigation based on place of origin.

In fact, Guelph professor Griffiths finds the lack of such scrutiny "worrying, especially as there's a big push towards traceability in systems at the moment."

Some industry representatives say country-focused data could be helpful. "Something we have identified with the CFIA ... is the need quite frankly for more market intelligence to understand a bit more about food, how it flows through Canada, what is refused entry, etc.," says Heather Holland of the Canadian Produce Marketing Association.

"When you look at statistics, it helps you identify trends. If there are trends that identify higher risk, that's something we could look at mitigating, whether it's an education issue or information availability issue or where people have to look at their practices and examine them again."

Bekedam, the WHO official, says that "if the percentage is far higher in China, of course then ... countries have to make it part of their assessment and see from what they're going to do with it."

China's food safety record is dismal, experts say. Much of it stems from the farm system: still largely tiny-plot farmers – hundreds of millions of them – often using barred or fake pesticides and fertilizers. Much of their crop or livestock is sold to traders without documentation or records.

Bekedam says what China exports is better controlled than what's produced for the domestic market. Earlier this month, state media reported that cancer became China's top killer last year, and put the blame on pollution, heavy use of additives to make animals grow faster, and pesticides.

An infamous example of greed trumping safety occurred in 2004, when 12 babies died after being fed fake baby formula. And last November, authorities discovered that farmers had added a cancer-causing dye to the feed of their ducks, in order to gives the yolks of their eggs a red colour and thus fetch a higher price.

Griffiths says one way that countries could be more assured of the safety of food from developing countries, including China, is to audit the facilities doing the exporting. Canada, the U.S. and the European Union already do that for meat.

"We need to take a preventative approach rather than an inspection approach," says Griffiths. "We should adopt the strategy of the EU, in that they're trying to certify individual companies" in China. "Basically we should be working with the Chinese government and food processors in China to try to put practices in place that are equivalent to those in Canada."

Bekedam emphasizes, however, that food safety is an issue worldwide. And that China is making improvements.

For his part, Carnevale says that in his time as a produce wholesaler, he's seen Chinese products improve in quality. Garlic was "lousy. But gradually they worked on it to the point where they were better than everybody else."

Earlier this month, after taking responsibility for the melamine scandal, China said it will step up inspections. In the past, it has also banned some of the most toxic pesticides.

In fact, Bekedam's report was made at the behest of the Chinese.

"They do accept they need some further advice on how to improve food safety," he says.

China has to do this, for a lot of money is at stake. Last Friday, The Los Angeles Times reported that two major food manufacturers in the U.S., Mission Foods Corp. and Tyson Foods Inc., ordered their suppliers to stop using ingredients from China.

Some Canadian growers and importers are taking it upon themselves to inspect the Chinese side of their businesses.

Tom Byttynen, president of Thomas Fresh Inc. of Calgary, says his staff visits the farm they've contracted in China, which produces 20 different vegetables for the Canadian market, to ensure quality standards are met.

"I have concerns from what is not entirely a first-world nation," Byttynen says, adding that the farm is "amazing" and audited by independent third parties from the U.S. or Japan. "We want to know that the product is grown properly and (we're not just interested in) food safety, but also that people are treated morally and ethically."

[T.G.]

It's time to rise up in total disgust and demand that the governments of the free world ban totally the import of any foodstuffs from China PERIOD.

They do not deserve our respect in any capacity.

A hearty amen. And while we're at it, let's be sure to boycott the Olympics. Why give the Chinese a golden opportunity to whitewash their crimes against humanity, both inside and outside their country?

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/new ... f7fda9729a

China set to severely punish Olympic 'troublemakers'
Security chief's leaked speech reveals plans to stifle dissent
Michael Sheridan
The Ottawa Citizen
Monday, May 21, 2007

A leaked speech by a police commander in charge of security at the 2008 Beijing Olympics has disclosed that the authorities fear mass protests by disaffected Chinese as the biggest threat to the Games.

The officer promised "swift and harsh" measures to forestall trouble, combined with "severe legal punishment."

Human rights campaigners were quick to predict intensified repression, systematically orchestrated by the national security apparatus.

The speech was delivered by Yu Hongyuan, a senior officer at the Olympics Security Protection Centre, to a joint meeting of security units on March 12 and was circulated in a restricted government newsletter, Beijing Xinfang.

The text was obtained by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an overseas pressure group. Independent Chinese analysts said it provided a detailed account of confidential plans by the security authorities.

"The main aim of 'security' for the Olympics will be the suppression of freedom," the human rights group said. It challenged the International Olympic Committee to hold the Chinese government to promises it had made to guarantee human rights as part of its bid for the Games.

Mr. Yu has previously been identified by the state media as the second-ranking officer in the Beijing Public Security Bureau. The leaked speech shows he is responsible for overseeing what the authorities term "collective incidents," a coded phrase for mass demonstrations.

Mr. Yu said he was planning the preventive detention of anyone organizing "incitement" and of those who "plot behind the scenes." He said police were building a databank of people known for bad behaviour, singling out Chinese who use the traditional right to petition government as a means to make trouble.

A typical "troublemaker" would be 50-year-old Ye Guozhu, who is serving a four-year sentence for campaigning against evictions in Beijing to make way for the Olympic building projects. Dubbed "the Olympic prisoner" by activists, Mr. Ye has allegedly been beaten and placed in solitary confinement.

The leaked speech also disclosed that during the Games, snatch squads of security men will be posted in Tiananmen Square and other sensitive venues.

To stifle protests, Mr. Yu cited a Chinese expression that means "harshly penalizing one to teach many a lesson and to frighten many more into submission."

The targets are Chinese with grievances against the government -- over land, wages or rights -- who are feared to be planning demonstrations.

There were more than 50,000 such "collective incidents" last year. Only last week, a disgruntled man evaded guards and set fire to the famous portrait of Mao Tse-tung in Tiananmen Square.

[styky]

It's a long article but worth the read.

<a href=http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3192596&page=1>Gore's 'Assault on Reason' an Assault on Bush
Former Vice President Blasts Bush for Iraq, 9/11</a>
Jake Tapper ABC NEWS

[littleharbour]

Made in China may be ok for toasters, but having experienced first hand the selective hygiene of the Chinese food industry [the perils of which I avoided through diligence and some local advice], there is no way I'd knowingly eat anything coming from that country unless I knew exactly how it had been processed. Frankly, I'm shocked that there hasn't been a total ban on the importation of Chinese food products until a testing regime can be implemented to ensure food safety. If a Canadian company had been caught sending tainted food into China, you can be sure that all such imports would be halted until further notice.

[Theresa]

I had no idea we were importing food of any sort from China until reading about the tainted dog food.

I will be reading labels but even then the food may have ingredients purchased from China. The poison in the dog food was from one ingredient.

[Garden-Gnome]

Good thing we aren't worrying about our own food supply - Canadian farmers can compete on their own - screw caring about how much it actually costs to ensure a safe food supply.

I know what I'm eating, and where it came from. What's on your plate tonight?

[Right-Wingnut]

Made in China may be ok for toasters, but having experienced first hand the selective hygiene of the Chinese food industry [the perils of which I avoided through diligence and some local advice], there is no way I'd knowingly eat anything coming from that country unless I knew exactly how it had been processed. Frankly, I'm shocked that there hasn't been a total ban on the importation of Chinese food products until a testing regime can be implemented to ensure food safety. If a Canadian company had been caught sending tainted food into China, you can be sure that all such imports would be halted until further notice.

Hear, hear.

We can all remember well the impact that the discovery of a single, solitary angry cow had on our export beef market.

[Right-Wingnut]

Only 56 views? Surely this topic is worthy of far more.

As the saying goes: "You are what you eat."

According to the info in the above articles, we'll all be Chinese in no time.

No wonder I have a craving for egg rolls.


Oh, and for any of you who are somewhat familiar with China, here's a bit of trivia for you:

When do the Chinese have their best elections?

Scroll down





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Last chance to bail out, but don't say I didn't warn you. Scroll down







Before bleakfast.

[Fabulous Fred]

If China is poisoning us I am cynical enough to believe it is NOT an accident.

[littleharbour]

Before bleakfast.

Not funny RW. Some of the finest people in this country are of Chinese origin. The problem is not the Chinese people. The problem is the communist Chinese government.

[concan]

Before bleakfast.

Not funny RW. Some of the finest people in this country are of Chinese origin. The problem is not the Chinese people. The problem is the communist Chinese government.

Very much correct.

Problem is every nation, every business wants to make a buck with Chinese imports and cheap labour. The Chinese govt gives a year of the rats ass about the world. Heck, they don't care about their own people and drive tanks over them if they dare speak up.

Forget Iran. China is our single biggest threat and our governments aren't doing anything to control that threat.

Right now, China is dictating to America. The trade "talks" were a joke. Nevermind human rights record. The Chinese say right from the start that they don't even want to come to the table if anyone dares talk about their copyright piracy and other schemes.

Nuke China and the world will be a better place.

[concan]

I had no idea we were importing food of any sort from China until reading about the tainted dog food.

I will be reading labels but even then the food may have ingredients purchased from China. The poison in the dog food was from one ingredient.

Do you expect the manufacturers to breakdown the origin of every ingredient?

For example the garlic prices mentioned above. $55 from Mexico and $13 from China. Not sure about the quantities. Peas from China the same thing.

You buy an item and it contains some garlic or some peas and will never know the origin of that food.

I have been suspicious for a while about foods, disease, bad sleep patterns etc.

Only chance for us is to buy from local growers. Avoid anything canned or frozen unless we buy fresh and freeze ourselves.

Some of the problems will not show up until a few years later. Our governments should protect us from this stuff and stop all food imports from China, India (same crap make no mistake) and other questionable nations.

[styky]

<a href=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1638436,00.html>The Growing Dangers of the China Trade</a> Like so many other things that Americans buy these days without thinking, those tubes of Dr. Cool, Superdent and Everfresh Smile2 began their life in a factory in China --in this case, in Wuxi, a city of 4.5 million about 80 miles west of Shanghai. They were sold by Goldcredit International Enterprises, which is based in a gated community called Lakebank Elegant Garden, within sight of China's Taihu Lake. It makes not just toothpaste but also pencil sharpeners and balloons, hand sanitizer and toothbrushes. "What we exported is in line with the Chinese-government standards," Goldcredit business manager Shi Jun says about the toothpaste. Adds manager Hu Keyu: "The Chinese government already issued a statement. What more do you want from us?"

Would a nontoxic dentifrice be asking too much? On the 8,000-mile journey between Wuxi and Homestead, Goldcredit's products move, in effect, through time. When a product made in China enters the U.S., it arrives with a kind of unfettered capitalism that hasn't existed in America for a century--uninhibited by regulation, lawsuits or, until recently, public outrage. It's difficult even for a businessman who tries to follow the rules. "You go to China, you check the place out, check the quality of the products," Botta says. But after the recall--of a product labeled safe in China--he is wary. He saw a big candy factory while he was in Wuxi. "I wouldn't buy that," he says. But he'll continue importing school supplies and shower curtains.

It's the same calculation that millions of American consumers are making since the recent recalls of deadly pet food, lead-paint-tainted toy trains and shredding tires made in China. The U.S. imported 40% of its consumer goods from China last year. But there is no practical way to gauge, other than by reputation, whether a Chinese import is as safe as it is cheap. So should you worry more about the extension cords or the TV? Screen the kids' toys but not their shoes? Until China's capitalism develops its own set of rules and limits, is that our only option in a made-in-China world?.......<a href=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1638436,00.html>CONTINUED</a>

[styky]

Are your flip flops made in China????

<a href=http://www.lamanaphotography.com/walmart.htm>Danger! Flip-Flops From Walmart - China Again!</a>