Soylent Red
The Communists are frantically trying to reassure consumers around the world that their products are safe. But don't expect Canada to double-check
Kevin Steel - July 30, 2007
At the end of the 1973 sci-fi film classic Soylent Green, the detective played by Charlton Heston discovers the food supply has been deliberately contaminated with human bodies. His cry of revulsion, "It's people!" quickly entered the popular culture and has been there ever since. Now that the world is coming to understand that many food products coming out of China are contaminated--often deliberately--with things like industrial chemicals and raw sewage, it's doubtful a Heston-like character will be running through the streets screaming, "It's people!" But the situation appears to be getting so bad, it probably wouldn't surprise anyone if he did.
How bad is it? Almost daily there are news reports of the latest scare coming out of China; products, not just food, found to be substandard or contaminated--toys covered in lead paint, wheat gluten laced with melamine, fake veterinary drugs, poisonous toothpaste, deadly puffer fish labelled as edible monkfish, other fish products contaminated with raw sewage, tainted dietary supplements, toxic cosmetics--the list goes on. All the recalls and warnings and bad publicity are plunging China into crisis as it struggles to regain world confidence.
"It's across the board: it's in vitamins, toothpaste; it's in our food products and pet foods as well. It puts a threat label on anything that is perishable that comes out of a particular country. For China this has very serious implications; even though a lot of what they are selling right now is not perishable, it's mostly manufactured commodities," says longtime China observer Al Santoli, director of the Asia-Pacific Initiative, based out of Washington, D.C.
The current trouble started in March over, of all things, pet food. It was just the sort of quirky, unforeseeable thing--like striking Polish dock workers starting a chain of events that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union--that leads to a full-blown crisis. It was discovered that cat and dog food produced by Canada-based Menu Foods contained wheat gluten that had been spiked with melamine. The melamine had been deliberately added--it was later discovered--at a plant in China to falsely boost the protein content of the gluten. Melamine, though it does contain protein, is a hard plastic with no food value, and pets started dying across the continent, primarily of kidney failure.
The contamination led to the largest pet food recall in American history. At first, as the scare spread, the Chinese fell back on their old ways, trying to deny there was a problem, almost as if they were oblivious to the severe loss of international credibility on health matters they'd suffered in 2002 during the SARS crisis. At that time they'd attempted, and failed, to cover up the inadequacies of their health system. Now their spin on the current crisis has fallen on deaf ears.
The story widened when it was discovered that wheat gluten entered the human food chain through hog farms, where some of the pet food was fed to the animals--not that it mattered how it landed on folks' dinner plates, since the gluten had been certified as fit for human consumption. Adding new angles to the story, the press started reporting on other Chinese food rejections and recalls, citing U.S. Federal Drug Administration statistics. It turned out that 69 per cent of all seafood rejected by the FDA this year was from China, and that the FDA had rejected, in the first four months, as many seafood shipments as it had for the entire year previous, primarily because of veterinary drug contamination. In fact, 104 of the 152 product recalls since the beginning of the year were for Chinese products. Then Europe got in on the act, banning the use of dog and cat fur in clothing items. The Chinese have been making stuffed animals, toys, hats, gloves, shoes, blankets and even complete fur coats out of dogs and cats, falsely labelling them as exotic fur from Corsac fox, Asian jackal, loup d'Asie (Asian wolf), mountain cat and rabbit.
The situation has the Chinese in damage control mode. For instance, on June 21 China finally promised to overhaul its food safety rules; Liu Pingjun, chief of the National Standardization Management Commission, will rework his country's 1,965 national food safety standards. "The top priority for building a food safety standards system is to revise as soon as possible the rules for farm produce and processed food," Liu said. Not that anyone expects it to do much good, since they have quite a few rules that have been in place for 12 years and nobody seems to have bothered following them.
For the most part the focus has been on the products. But there is a bigger picture. "More than just the issue of the products themselves, it comes down to the system of government that has these kinds of lax controls. The kind of corruption that's involved, whether it's in the way production is done, in the way labour is conducted, or the banking system or their stock market--which a lot of people have invested in--it sets a very serious warning trend that when you are dealing with China, you don't know what to expect. There's no consistency, no guarantee of quality, honesty or of being treated fairly. You work with them at your own risk," Santoli says.
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