China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves

[Amelia]

China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves

By DAVID BARBOZA

July 5, 2007

The NewYork Times

SHANGHAI, July 4 — China said on Wednesday that nearly a fifth of the food and consumer products that it checked in a nationwide survey this year were found to be substandard or tainted, underscoring the risk faced by its own consumers even as the country’s exports come under greater scrutiny overseas.

Regulators said the broad survey of foods, agricultural tools, clothing, women and children’s products and other types of goods turned up sizable quality and safety failure rates for products that are sold domestically.

The government said, for instance, that canned and preserved fruit and dried fish contained excessive bacteria; that 20 percent of the fruit and vegetable juice surveyed was deemed substandard, and that some children’s products were defective or laced with harmful chemicals.

The announcement came in the midst of a growing scandal over the quality and safety of Chinese-made exports and follows a series of international recalls involving everything from contaminated pet food ingredients and counterfeit toothpaste to toxic toys, defective tires and contaminated seafood.

The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the survey, conducted in the first half of this year, showed quality and safety improvements compared with conditions in the period a year earlier. But the announcement also suggested that Chinese consumers are at serious risk of being harmed by purchasing tainted foods, substandard goods and suspect or defective equipment.

Regulators said, in effect, that goods sold in China were far more hazardous than the exports that were driving the country’s economic growth and now partly the subject of safety and quality debates.

Li Yuanping, a regulatory official, told the state-run Xinhua News Agency last month that “99 percent of the food exported to the United States was up to safety standards over the past two years, which is a very high percentage.”

But regulators in the United States, Europe and other countries are growing increasingly concerned about quality and safety failures involving Chinese made goods.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration said it would block certain types of Chinese-made seafood, including shrimp, eel and catfish, from entering the United States unless it was certified to be safe.

American regulators say they were forced to act after witnessing a sharp rise this year in the number of seafood products contaminated with carcinogens or excessive antibiotic residues.

Facing a storm of criticism, China has repeatedly defended the quality and safety of its food and the goods it exports. But regulators have also moved to crack down on fake and poor-quality foods and consumer products.

Nearly every week for the last several months, the government and China’s state-controlled media have provided more evidence of how widespread are the quality and safety problems in this country, despite signs of progress in many areas of commerce.

During the last month, regulators and quality inspectors say they have discovered candied fruit with 63 times the permitted amount of sweetener; excessive additives and preservatives in nearly 40 percent of the children’s snacks surveyed in western Guangxi province; fake human blood protein at hospitals; and food tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.

Last week, the government even said it had shut about 180 food factories nationwide because of food safety violations. From December to May, regulators said they uncovered 23,000 cases involving fake or low-quality food.

Experts say aggressive and opportunistic entrepreneurs continue to take advantage of the country’s chronically weak enforcement of regulations, choosing to blend fake ingredients into products; to sign contracts agreeing to sell one product only to later switch the raw materials for something cheaper; and to doctor, adulterate or even color foods to make them look fresher or more appetizing, when in fact they might be old and stale.

In its report released on Wednesday, the government said 80.9 percent of the food and other products checked in a nationwide survey met safety standards, and that this rate was higher than a year earlier, when about 78 percent of the good surveyed were deemed safe.

The government said that more than 3,000 types of food had been checked nationwide and that thousands of companies were examined.

But regulators offered few details about why certain goods failed the quality and safety standards or how dangerous the products might be.

The government did, however, say baby formula and baby clothing did not meet the safety standards, that animal feed, fertilizer and agricultural equipment were defective and that many food items were mislabeled or heavily colored by additives.

[Amelia]

Is China trying to poison Americans and their pets?

U.S. market flooded with foods unfit for humans, tainted with carcinogens, pesticides, bacteria, drugs

May 27, 2007

© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – While Americans are still recovering from a scandal over poison pet foods imported from China, FDA inspectors report tainted food imports intended for American humans are being rejected with increasing frequency because they are filthy, are contaminated with pesticides and tainted with carcinogens, bacteria and banned drugs.

Last month, like most months, China topped the list of countries whose products were refused by the FDA – and that list includes many countries, including Mexico and Canada, who export far more food products to the U.S. than China.

Some 257 refusals of Chinese products were recorded in April. By comparison, only 140 were from Mexico and only 23 from Canada.

Refused by the FDA in April because they were "filthy":

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

fermented bean curd

Among the foods rejected because they were contaminated with pesticides:

frozen eel

ginseng

frozen red raspberry crumble

mushrooms

Frozen catfish was stopped because it was laced with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines were turned away because they were coated with putrefying bacteria.

Toothbrushes were rejected last month because they were improperly labeled. And last week the FDA found Chinese toothpaste contaminated with a chemical used in antifreeze – the same chemical that killed people in Panama last year when it turned up in cough syrup.

Just three days ago, the U.S. warned consumers not to buy or eat imported fish labeled as monkfish, which actually may be puffer fish, containing a potentially deadly toxin called tetrodotoxin. Two people in the Chicago area became ill after consuming homemade soup containing the fish. One was hospitalized due to severe illness.

The FDA is also on the lookout for vegetable proteins contaminated with melamine – the chemical that killed American cats and dogs when it was imported from China in pet food.

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

Most of the time, the reason listed is simply "filthy," the official term used when inspectors smell decomposition or gross contamination of food.

Officials say FDA inspectors examine only a tiny percentage of the food imported from foreign countries – about 1 percent -- meaning most of the contaminated products make it inside the country and to the shelves of retailers.

In the age of globalization, food imports in America are big business and getting bigger. In 2006, they represented $64 billion – a 33 percent increase over 2003. No country is increasing its food exports faster than China – about 20 percent in the last year alone.

China has become America's leading supplier of apple juice used as a food sweetener, garlic and garlic powder, sausage casings and cocoa butter.

China has also attempted to export hundreds of thousands of pounds of chickens and poultry products to the U.S., even though it is not yet certified to do so. Chinese exporters disguise the meat by labeling crates "dried lily flower" or "prune slices" or "vegetables."

Despite the deliberate deception, the U.S. government is about to certify the Chinese to export poultry legally.

[Amelia]

Fake building material imperils Chinese railway

GEOFFREY YORK

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

July 7, 2007

BEIJING — Fake construction material is jeopardizing the safety of China's newest high-speed railway, a Chinese newspaper says.

An investigation by the newspaper found that large quantities of bogus material had been used in several hundred kilometres of a $12-billion (U.S.) high-speed railway between the cities of Wuhan and Guangzhou.

The newspaper, China Economic Times, said the scam by unscrupulous suppliers could lead to cracking in the railway's concrete supports, creating a “great danger” to the railway.

The newspaper report, published this week, has triggered an investigation by the Chinese Railways Ministry

The report is the latest revelation in the widening scandal over shoddy and hazardous goods in China. The issue has emerged as a global concern, with many countries, including Canada, increasingly worried by the dangers of food and other products from China.

Almost 20 per cent of goods made in China for domestic consumption have failed China's own standards for safety or quality in the first half of this year, a government agency reported this week. The tests focused on food products, fertilizers, farm machinery and common consumer goods.

China has also announced that 180 food factories have been shut down in recent months because their products were contaminated with illegal materials such as formaldehyde, industrial dyes and paraffin wax.

Fake cellphone batteries are another lethal danger. This week, the Chinese media revealed that a number of counterfeit batteries have exploded in safety tests. A man was killed in western China last month when a cellphone exploded in his chest pocket while he was welding. The explosion broke his ribs, and rib fragments pierced his heart. The faulty battery was labelled Motorola, but it was reportedly a fake.

In the railway scam, the China Economic Times reported that the railway's contractors had been tricked into buying large quantities of fake or deficient coal fly ash, a common ingredient in concrete.

The newspaper described the suppliers as “profiteers blinded by greed.” It published several photos of trucks loaded with fake fly ash and factories where the material is produced.

It said the bogus material was discovered in March by a construction engineer, who noticed a blockage in a pipe where concrete was being poured. Such blockages are uncommon, and he suspected it was caused by phony fly ash. The fake material looks identical to the genuine material, and only laboratory testing can tell them apart.

The high-speed railway, designed to carry trains at speeds up to 350 kilometres an hour between two of China's biggest cities, is currently under construction. It is described as the longest and most technologically advanced high-speed railway in China, and it has been praised lavishly by the Chinese news media.

Faced with mounting evidence of hazardous goods, the Chinese authorities have reacted ambivalently. They have announced crackdowns and safety campaigns, but they have also reacted with denials and censorship.

Harsh penalties have been announced in some cases. Yesterday, a former drug regulator was given a death sentence for accepting $307,000 in bribes from two medical companies.

At the same time, however, China has attacked the foreign news coverage of the hazardous products. “I think it would be better if the media would stop playing up this issue,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said this week.

Last week, Chinese censors went through every issue of Time magazine sold in China to tear out and destroy the first two pages of an article headlined “The Growing Dangers of the China Trade.”

The daily propaganda newspaper China Daily accused “foreign protectionists” of using safety issues to discriminate against Chinese products. “Any bias against products with a ‘made in China' tag does injustice to Chinese exports' overall good quality,” it argued in an editorial this week.