Pacific Spirit Marine Institute

More Tainted Chinese Products,with Fewer ‘Factories’ Operating

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

China has one million food-processing plants give or take a few thousand; whose counting anyway?

Apparently China is counting. The ‘State Administration for Industry and Commerce’, a Chinese regulatory agency said 152,000, yes that’s one hundred fifty-two thousand, food plants and retailers were shut down last year due to unsanitary and substandard food being sold.

Now 180 more factories have been closed. They haven’t been closed due to employees failing to wash up after lavatory visits, they haven’t been closed because hairs were falling out of the nets into the potato salad. No, nothing that benign; Nothing that innocent.

These factories were purposfully, with forethought, contaminating their foods and products. Toss in some malice sprinkled with forethought and we, in the west, call that a felony. Using things like formaldehyde to heft up a product, keep it from spoiling, or any other reason seems far from a malice free act. Even an illiterate should be able to reason things like anti-freeze, formaldehyde are poisons. Most people never want to come in contact with formaldehyde until they’re dead and many don’t want to even then.

Sadly formaldehyde and anti-freeze are on the short list of poisons being pumped into a long list of Chinese products. Paraffin and industiral oil perhaps? How about mixing in a little ‘already used’ food. I’m unable to determine in which food group ‘recycled food, expired, or already used’ may fall.

So, 23,000 contaminated food products were seized by Chinese inpsectors and they aren’t finished yet. And, less than 1 percent of regulated imports from China were even inspected by the US FDA.

So what is our tally now? 152,180 Chinese factories closed since December. China says, most of these factories were small, having fewer than 10 employees, and they were ‘unlicensed’. If China is trying the quell the trepidation with which the west is eye-balling their products, calling a business with fewer than 10 employess a factory isn’t a step in the right direction. Around here that’s a ‘mom and pop’ business. That’s Mom, Pop their three kids and their spouses. Oh, and one cousin. See how that makes 9 employees? That’s fewer than 10 employees which in China constitutes a ‘factory’.

But, now comes the fun part of this equation; these small ‘factories’ make up 75% of China’s one million food-processing plants. Excuse me? Now here’s the real question. At some point did China lay down the figure of 1 million food-processing plants in order to impress the west or maybe intimidate? Were I wanting to become a player on the ‘world market’ it could be advantageous to inflate my presense, like a puffer fish, in order to appear a little larger to preditors. On the other hand, when the products I’m exporting start turning up with poison in them, it would behoove me to say that a group of tiny, unregulated, unlicensed ‘vendors’ is what ‘did-me-in’. Understandably and entirely not my fault.

China wanted to look like a formidable player on the world market. It looks as though the way to do that was for the government to spread it’s arms open wide and sweep in every available resourse, including the ‘mom and pop’ operations.

Maybe the ’sleeping giant’ really has been asleep. Maybe the giant part is the consumer. Maybe we underestimated China’s consumer goods manufacturing prowess. Maybe we saw millions of tanks, and hundreds of millions of woven Chinese Finger Traps and mistook that for commercial expertise.

If Friday’s news about factory closures’ was meant to quell the rising fears concerning Chinese Imports…it didn’t work on me.

Labels: China, Chinese, Poison, Tainted, exports, imports