Today’s Update on the Pet Food Recall—5/17/2007

Companies who’ve been importing Chinese vegetable protein products are, apparently, spooked and are demanding that the products they’re buying are free of melamine:

HONG KONG, May 17 (Reuters) – Foreign buyers of Chinese food are asking for safety tests following the melamine pet food debacle, threatening the country’s competitive position in a wide range of markets, including organic ingredients.

Industry officials said U.S. and other firms had demanded a certificate that farm products were free of melamine.

Their comments came after a U.S. Food and Drug Administration team visited China to investigate how melamine, a chemical product, got into pet food, killing at least 16 pets in the United States and leading to a recall of more than 100 brands of pet food.

Note that the demands came after the FDA visit to China. They’re prudent, I think, and the comments suggest that importers aren’t buying China’s blithe assurances. American importers aren’t the only ones who are concerned:

The industry officials said Japan, which accounts for about a quarter of China’s farm product exports, had also recommended importers check for melamine in Chinese products, such as rice flour or wheat gluten, for use in animal feed.

“The safety tests for raw materials are likely to get tougher,” said a senior official from a Japanese food processing plant in China.

“Eventually they could demand traceability similar to that for non-GMO products … which would raise costs. Given higher costs and credibility, there’s a question if you would still want to buy raw materials from China.”

One thing that’s not mentioned is that the costs of due diligence, for any industry, in investigating the business worthiness of any prospective vendor increase with distance and difference. As these costs rise the savings realized by getting low ticket items or ingredients can evaporate rapidly.

Will the issue of traceability come more to the forefront?

Asked how to guarantee the quality of food imported from China, an official in charge of food safety at one of Hong Kong’s largest food retailers said: “It’s very important to get system in place for traceability all the way back in the supply chain.

“When you have traceability, you can then have accountability. I think this is what China lacks.”

Here a link to some commentary on the Congressional food safety hearings. There’s a link to video of the hearings themselves here. It’s pretty bland but the final paragraph of the commentary says it all:

It seems fairly certain that the United States House of Representatives will likely pass legislation during this congressional session to give FDA mandatory recall authority. In the wake of the recent food contamination outbreaks, it is hard to make the argument that FDA should not have such an authority and the industry seems to agree. Second, we can expect to see legislation that would give FDA much broader powers to obtain certain types of information from food processors, particularly when a food contamination outbreak has occurred. However, it is unclear exactly what this expanded authority would look like because FDA already has broad authority under the Bioterrorism Act to request records when there is a threat to human or animal health. Finally, it also is very likely that food safety funding will be reallocated from USDA to FDA and additionally, FDA is likely to receive additional funding to carry out food safety inspections.

I think we need a country-of-origin labelling law if not complete traceability.

Dietician Suzanne Havala Hobbs has written a rather incendiary op-ed criticizing the USDA, FDA, and Congress for the problems with food safety revealed by the pet food recall scandal. I don’t agree with everything she has to say but she makes some interesting points. For example, I was unaware of this:

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t want you to stop eating pork or chicken. According to Secretary Mike Johanns, it’s safe for you to eat meat from animals that ate the same chow that killed cats and dogs. Officials argue that levels of contamination are so low that they are unlikely to cause harm.

At the very same time federal government officials offered their assurances that the food is safe, they asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put special emphasis on monitoring the nation for an increase in human kidney failures.

The emphasis is mine. I think that’s prudent but I’m honestly astounded that this isn’t something they’ve been doing on an ongoing basis all along. What will they use as a baseline? I certainly hope they go back at least prior to 2000.

1 comment… add one
  • nuunyabus Link

    That’s the one I’ve been waiting to hear! A human kidney failure WATCH.

    It seems as though NOTHING is synchronised in this ‘government’ anymore. Thank you for bringing this to the public’s attention. Words like, “we believe, we think, we don’t know what it is but there is no harm to humans, or the chinese factory factory closed up before we got there, but we investigated” are no longer digestible.

    The General Public is smarter than the government-except the government retains and controls our money, leaving us defenseless. I would much rather have my tax dollars to do my own testing rather than used for luxury entertainment purposes by uneducated, illiterate, immoral government hicks.

    Entrepreneurs, ATTENTION: Design over the counter home testing kits for every imaginable food, chemical, disease, etc. Now that’s privatization owned by the public.

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