Glowing Pork, Exploding Watermelons
Why China Can't Keep Its Food Safe
Article Summary and Author Biography
Since the scandal four years ago over melamine-laced powdered milk that sickened thousands of children, China's food record hasn't improved. Companies have been caught making ham laced with pesticides, counterfeit alcoholic drinks, fake baby formula, adulterated pickled vegetables, and carcinogenic chili sauce. And Beijing's responses are having little impact.
THOMAS N. THOMPSON is Research Director at Regent Group, a financial research and economic analysis firm.
Snapshot
Recent headlines have been shocking: 16,000 decaying pig carcasses in Shanghai’s Whampoa River, dire air quality reports in Beijing, and hundreds of thousands of people dying prematurely because of environmental degradation. China's pollution problem is holding back its economy -- and is endagering its people and the rest of the world in the process.
A worker arranges slaughtered pigs at pork-processing factory in Wuhan. (Courtesy Reuters)
In July 2008, 16 children in the Chinese province of Gansu fell ill, suffering from low urine production. Their numbers multiplied, and by November hundreds of thousands of young Chinese throughout the country were experiencing varying degrees of kidney failure. Government inspections soon revealed that several prominent dairy companies and their suppliers were to blame. In an attempt to make it appear as if their products contained more protein, these companies had added melamine-formaldehyde resin, an inexpensive nitrogen-rich chemical used in plastic manufacturing, to baby formula and other types of milk.
At least ten children died. And according to researchers from Beijing University, although most children fully recovered, some 12 percent of those who ingested melamine-laced formula still showed kidney abnormalities two years later. A slew of criminal prosecutions followed the initial incident in 2008, primarily at the level of provincial People's Courts. Both dairy representatives and complicit government officials were punished for tampering with China's food supply. Two people were executed, another was given a suspended death penalty, three more received life in prison, and several others received long prison terms. After the World Health Organization announced that Chinese consumer confidence would be hard hit, government officials ordered the country's media outlets to tone down coverage of the scandal. Today, there is lingering speculation that Beijing suppressed reporting of the melamine incident, and the risk it posed to countless children, for fear of bad publicity during the 2008 Summer Olympics...
