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By Kevin Steel ⋅ July 30, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Communists are frantically trying to reassure consumers around the world that their products are safe. But don’t expect Canada to double-check

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.

That’s a risk Canada is apparently more than willing to take. Last year, this country imported $777 million worth of food products alone from China. How much of that is inspected? No one really knows. When the statistics on rejected Chinese goods and food products began coming out of the U.S., Canadian media started checking around here. They were startled to discover bureaucrats at places like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency kept no figures on rejections or recalls by country.

This is upsetting for people like Randy Hillier. He is now a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, preparing to run in the upcoming provincial election. But he’s also past-president of the Lanark and Ontario Landowners Association, a group that supports local farmers, and has been following the Chinese import issue for awhile– long before the current crisis hit the headlines. It burns Hillier that agencies like the CFIA make a big show of nailing local farmers and businesses hard, but really don’t do much to protect Canadians from bad exports. “You wouldn’t believe how many regulations there are that prevent local food from getting to the table. And the amount of local enforcement that anybody in local food production has to deal with, to overcome just to survive! We see groups like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and local health units attacking local food producers while turning a blind eye to the loads of sh–t coming into this country,” Hillier fumes.

As an example of aggressive local enforcement, Hillier points to the CFIA’s over-the-top attack on local bakeries in the Ottawa area last December. One mom-and-pop bakery, in Renfrew, Ont., was nailed by the CFIA and asked to submit each of their 300 recipes for testing to a laboratory, at a cost of approximately $1000 per recipe. The community rallied, and with the help of the Landowners Association, forced the CFIA to back off.

Hillier attempted to get some figures out of the CFIA through a request to the Library of Parliament, such as how many shipments were rejected from China, and how many food inspectors were actually at Canadian ports. But the CFIA couldn’t answer.

The CFIA is apparently feeling the heat, and in interview with the Western Standard managed to offer one statistic. According to Paul Mayers, acting director of the Bureau of Microbial Hazards at CFIA, 12 per cent of fish products coming from China are regularly rejected due to contamination. But CFIA doesn’t target country of origin when determining what to inspect. “We take a risk-based approach based on the commodity first,” Mayers explains, “and then within that commodity we recognize a problem. And if that problem is associated with a specific source country, we’ll zero in on that source country for more intense scrutiny in order to address that particular problem.” The CFIA maintains that although Canada doesn’t have the data the U.S. has, our food inspection is equal to theirs. And just how much imported food is inspected in the U.S.? About three per cent. The FDA only has about 1,700 inspectors at the docks for the whole of the U.S. Canada, presumably, has much fewer.

If consumers think they can protect themselves at the supermarket from contaminated goods by keeping an eye out for products marked “Made in China,” they should think again. It is deceptively simple to import a food item from anywhere in the world and legally relabel it as “Product of Canada.” Just two things have to happen: the product has to be “substantially transformed” (to use the phrase of the Competition Bureau, which sets the guidelines) in appearance, and 51 per cent of the retail price has to be established in Canada.

Take apple juice, for instance. Canada imports a lot of apple juice concentrate from China. Add water, put it in a bottle, put on a label and ship to the store; the appearance has been significantly altered, and over half the retail price can be justified by processing and transportation. Now it can be labelled a “Product of Canada,” even though it contains no juice from apples grown in Canada under Canadian food standards.

This is done regularly with products from all over the world, but more and more it’s done with food coming from China. Extrapolate the concept to fish, mushrooms, mandarins, clementines, pears, fresh and frozen mixed vegetables, sausage casings, tea, pepper, sugar, chocolate–to name but a few of the food items imported from China–and the scale of this entirely legal-in-Canada deception starts to become apparent.

The whole situation is really starting to get to Canadian food producers. Merle Bowes is an organic vegetable farmer in the Ottawa area. “These things affect me financially, but my greater concern is as a consumer. These food safety programs that we hear about are not effective, they’re not working. Go to the CFIA website and look at the list of recalled items. Many of them are for imported items or foods that contain imported ingredients. The word ‘recall’ is critical, because that means they’re already in the system. The name ‘guinea pig’ comes to mind,” Bowes says.

While the problem may originate overseas, Canada’s inspection practices, which rigorously pursue local producers but ignore foreign products, are importing the danger here.

[This article appeared in the July 30, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]