Chinese exports drawing scrutiny
Push on to address food safety issues
WASHINGTON -- Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at US ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements and other products .
For years, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption, according to US inspection records. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught -- many of which turned up at US borders again .
Now the confluence of two events -- the contamination of US chicken, pork, and fish with tainted pet food ingredients and last week's resumption of economic and trade talks with China -- has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.
"This isn't the first time we've had an incident from a Chinese supplier," said Pat Verduin, a senior vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group in Washington.
But change will prove difficult, policy analysts say, in large part because US companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy. "So many US companies are directly or indirectly involved in China now, the commercial interest of the United States these days has become to allow imports to come in as quickly and smoothly as possible," said Robert B. Cassidy, a former assistant US trade representative for China and now a director for Kelley Drye Collier Shannon, a Washington law firm.
US agricultural exports to China have grown to more than $5 billion a year and have enormous growth potential. Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of course, as revealed by the many lawsuits that US pet food companies now face.
Until recently, however, many firms and the government concluded that those risks were worth taking. But after the pet food scandal, some are recalculating.
In the first four months of 2007, FDA inspectors refused 298 food shipments from China.
Miao Changxia, of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said China "attaches great importance" to the pet food debacle. "Investigations were immediately carried out . . . and a host of emergency measures have been taken to ensure the hygiene and safety of exported plant-origin protein products," she said. 