Recent spate of food scares has China on edge

Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China
April 30, 2007
Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China
By DAVID BARBOZA and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
New York Times

ZHANGQIU, China ?- As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ?'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."

Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.

No one knows exactly how melamine (which is not believed to be particularly toxic) became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal.

The link to China has set off concerns among critics of the Food and Drug Administration that ingredients in pet food as well as human food, which are increasingly coming from abroad, are not being adequately screened.

"They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. "Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional."

Now, with evidence mounting that the tainted wheat gluten came from China, American regulators have been granted permission to visit the region to conduct inspections of food treatment facilities.

The Food and Drug Administration has already banned imports of wheat gluten from China after it received more than 14,000 reports of pets believed to have been sickened by packaged food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The Department of Agriculture has also stepped in. On Thursday, the agency ordered more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.

The pet food case is also putting China's agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

For their part, Chinese officials dispute any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But regulators here on Friday banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies.

Yet what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Many animal feed operators here advertise on the Internet, seeking to purchase melamine scrap. The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, one of the companies that American regulators named as having shipped melamine-tainted wheat gluten to the United States, had posted such a notice on the Internet last March.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is then used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, golf ball-size chunks of white rock, is sometimes being sold to local agricultural entrepreneurs, who say they mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that is high in protein.

"It just saves money if you add melamine scrap," said the manager of an animal feed factory here.

Last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, two animal feed producers explained in great detail how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, whose chemical properties help the feed register an inflated protein level.

Melamine is the new scam of choice, they say, because urea ?- another nitrogen-rich chemical ?- is illegal for use in pig and poultry feed and can be easily detected in China as well as in the United States.

"People use melamine scrap to boost nitrogen levels for the tests," said the manager of the animal feed factory. "If you add it in small quantities, it won't hurt the animals."

The manager, who works at a small animal feed operation here that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas, said he has mixed melamine scrap into animal feed for years.

He said he was not currently using melamine. But he then pulled out a plastic bag containing what he said was melamine powder and said he could dye it any color to match the right feed stock.

He said that melamine used in pet food would probably not be harmful. "Pets are not like pigs or chickens," he said casually, explaining that they can afford to eat less protein. "They don't need to grow fast."

The resulting melamine-tainted feed would be weak in protein, he acknowledged, which means the feed is less nutritious.

But, by using the melamine additive, the feed seller makes a heftier profit because melamine scrap is much cheaper than soy, wheat or corn protein.

"It's true you can make a lot more profit by putting melamine in," said another animal feed seller here in Zhangqiu. "Melamine will cost you about $1.20 for each protein count per ton whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference."

Feed producers who use melamine here say the tainted feed is often shipped to feed mills in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai, or down to Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. They also said they knew that some melamine-laced feed had been exported to other parts of Asia, including South Korea, North Korea, Indonesia and Thailand.

Evidence is mounting that Chinese protein exports have been tainted with melamine and that its use in agricultural regions like this one is widespread. But the government has issued no recall of any food or feed product here in China.

Indeed, few people outside the agriculture business know about the use of melamine scrap. The Chinese news media ?- which is strictly censored ?- has not reported much about the country's ties to the pet food recall in the United States. And few in agriculture here see any harm in using melamine in small doses; they simply see it as cheating a little on protein, not harming animals or pets.

As for the sale of melamine scrap, it is increasingly popular as a fake ingredient in feed, traders and workers here say.

At the Hebei Haixing Insect Net Factory in nearby Hebei Province, which makes animal feed, a manager named Guo Qingyin said: "In the past melamine scrap was free, but the price has been going up in the past few years. Consumption of melamine scrap is probably bigger than that of urea in the animal feed industry now."

And so melamine producers like the ones here in Zhangqiu are busy.

A man named Jing, who works in the sales department at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory here, said on Friday that prices have been rising, but he said that he had no idea how the company's melamine scrap is used.

"We have an auction for melamine scrap every three months," he said. "I haven't heard of it being added to animal feed. It's not for animal feed."
---------------------------------------

David Barboza reported from Zhangqiu and Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Chicago. Rujun Shen also contributed reporting from Zhangqiu.

Imported food can sometimes arrive with danger
Imported food can sometimes arrive with danger
By Deb Kollars, Jim Downing and Dorsey Griffith
McClatchy Newspapers
4/29/07

Recent spate of food scares has China on edge

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - With food coming in from all corners of the earth, the simple, necessary, daily act of eating in America has become not just an exercise in the delicious, but also the awe-inspiring:

Peaches in the dead of winter. Golden curries from Asia. Cookies that stay fresh for months. Powders that turn a morning smoothie into fuel for a marathoner.

But the global dinner plate also comes with dangers, as has been painfully demonstrated in the recent scare from the discovery of the industrial chemical melamine in pet food - and now, with experts warning it may have spread to the human food chain.

"This whole debacle where you've got a plastic getting into a food supply shines a huge spotlight on a broken, broken system," said Elisa Odabashian, director of food safety for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports.

According to consumer and food safety experts, a vast array of foods and ingredients pours into the United States every year with little or no scrutiny. Much of the food comes from countries with less stringent regulations on pesticides, processing and sanitation.

In the past, grapes from Chile, raspberries from Guatemala and onions from Mexico have sickened or even led to the deaths of consumers.

In recent days consumers learned that pet food contaminated with the melamine was fed to hogs destined for market.

The revelations pushed worries over imported foods and ingredients to a new level and forced consumers to ask troubling questions about aspects of the food supply they may have taken for granted:

Who's making all the ingredients and additives going into food these days? What's going into products whose names we often can't even pronounce? Who's keeping an eye on safety?

Only about 1 percent of food from other countries undergoes inspection at U.S. points of entry. Often, reviews include little more than a paperwork check.

"The big red strawberries in the middle of gloomy January are very pretty," Odabashian said. "But they're very likely being produced in countries with far less regulation than what we have here."

For years, the United States exported more food than it imported. Recently that balance shifted. In 2006, the nation exported $62.6 billion in food items and imported $75.1 billion from 175 countries, a jump of more than 60 percent in the last decade, according to inflation-adjusted trade data from the U.S. Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service.

The bulk of what Americans eat still is produced in this country. About 15 percent comes from other countries, said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. For some categories imports run higher, he noted. For example, 80 percent of seafood, 50 percent of tree nuts and 45 percent of fruits eaten in this country come from elsewhere.

In addition, a growing portion of foods processed here contain ingredients of foreign origin, with China an emerging major supplier.

How much arrives from abroad is anyone's guess. Currently, seafood is the only food required to carry a label showing the country of origin.

Packages of processed foods must only list where the "final transformation" of the product took place, according to Allen Matthys, a regulatory specialist at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Food companies must keep records on their ingredient suppliers, but they don't have to disclose that information to the public - or even the government - unless regulators suspect public health is at risk, said Benjamin England, an attorney who worked at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 17 years.

The nation's food inspection system is disjointed and inadequate, consumer and food safety experts said. Recent U.S. outbreaks of E. coli from contaminated spinach and salmonella from tainted peanut butter illustrate the need for a stronger food safety network, they said.

The FDA has jurisdiction over 80 percent of food produced in this country, including seafood, fresh produce and processed foods.

Yet it has only several hundred inspectors for at least 60,000 food processing plants across the nation, Doyle said. In contrast, the USDA, which oversees meat and poultry, has 7,600 inspectors for 7,000 U.S. plants.

When it comes to imports, the inspection picture is even worse.

The FDA is charged with assuring the safety of roughly 17 million product shipments each year, about two-thirds of them food. The volume has more than tripled since 1999, while the nation's inspection force has remained static in size. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government created new food safety measures, but it has followed through on few.

Under agency targets, about 1 percent of import shipments are supposed to get a close look from FDA officials. Such inspections can range from simply reviewing paperwork to actually sending a product to a lab for testing, England said.

Inspecting the food coming into this country is a worthwhile effort, FDA records show.

In March, FDA inspectors rejected 1,526 shipments - mostly food but also drugs and medical devices - from 75 countries.

China had 215 rejected shipments and India 279. A shipment of "Chilli" powder from Bangladesh was ruled "to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food."

The problems aren't limited to Asian exporters. A load of smoked salmon from Norway tested positive for Listeria, an often-lethal bacteria.

Many food contamination problems come from unsanitary or faulty processing.

But last week's revelation about melamine and related chemicals turning up in two commonly used protein ingredients - wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate - raised a different specter: deliberate contamination. Federal officials are investigating whether the proteins were spiked with the chemicals to make them appear to have higher protein content.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer group in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday called for a ban on imports of wheat gluten, rice protein and other grain products from China until the FDA can certify their safety.

"This is a warning sign our system is really vulnerable," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the center.

Protein sources are so widely sprinkled across Americans' diets in products with long shelf lives that it would be impossible to do an effective recall if the human food supply got contaminated, DeWaal said.

In an unprecedented move, the FDA announced last week it would start testing imports of six proteins that are used not only in pet foods, but in breads, baby formulas, protein bars, and a huge array of other foods.

Targeted proteins are mostly used to make foods more nutritionally functional and appealing to consumers.

A creamier soup, a sturdier meatless sausage, a more nutritious baby formula - all can be achieved with ingredients made from soy, wheat or corn.

With constant pressure to cut costs, U.S. food companies increasingly turn to foreign suppliers for lower priced soy, corn and wheat protein ingredients.

"It's cheaper, and some places do an excellent job of marketing," Rushing said.

Consumer watchdogs believe labels should carry more information about where ingredients originate. But some industry experts said it would be impractical to do so.

"The label would be as long as your arm," said Daniel Fabricant, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Natural Products Association in Washington, D.C.

FDA plan to close field labs draws fire
FDA plan to close field labs draws fire
By Tony Pugh
McClatchy Newspapers
5/3/07

WASHINGTON - A Food and Drug Administration plan to close seven of 13 field laboratories has angered some lawmakers, government workers and safety advocates, who fear the move will chase away skilled veteran employees and hurt the FDA's ability to respond to public health emergencies.

The FDA's field labs inspect and analyze food, drugs, animal medications and feeds, medical devices and other health products.

The labs check for compliance with federal guidelines, protect consumers from unsafe, ineffective and mislabeled products, and help investigate public health threats such as product tampering, bio-terrorism, food-borne illnesses and contaminated blood supplies.

Several of the facilities helped investigate the recent pet food scare and E. coli and salmonella outbreaks in spinach and peanut butter. On the heels of these crises, the proposed lab closings have been met with strong suspicion.

"In the middle of all these outbreaks and contamination issues, the timing of the proposal is extraordinarily bad," said Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America.

Over the next several years, the FDA wants to close labs in Philadelphia; Denver; Detroit; Alameda, Calif.; Lenexa, Kan.; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Winchester, Mass. Those operations and an estimated 250 employees would then be moved to five multi-purpose "mega-labs" that could handle all types of FDA testing.

The multi-purpose labs are in Atlanta; Jamaica, N.Y.; Jefferson, Ark.; Irvine, Calif.; and Bothell, Wash. A forensic chemistry lab in Cincinnati wouldn't be affected.

Most of the buildings slated for closure are older facilities, needing major renovations or complete replacement, said Diana Kolaitis, director of field operations at the FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs. Most have expiring leases and aren't suited for expansion. The current roster of FDA labs occupy 500,000 square feet, but only 300,000 are being used.

"So all the (staff at) the labs that have been recommended for closure could easily fit into the remaining laboratories," Kolaitis said. Downsizing also would make investment in new lab equipment easier.

But some fear that fewer labs would delay the testing of food, biological medical products or drugs in the event of a public health emergency.

Kolaitis said proximity to the labs isn't a concern because testing samples could be sent to any facility by overnight mail. She noted that a network of state laboratories also is ready to assist in any food-related emergency.

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 150,000 government workers in more than 30 agencies, said most FDA employees wouldn't be willing to relocate to new lab locations.

"They'll simply go out into industry and get jobs in locations where they are today, and their experience and skill will be lost to the FDA," Kelley said.

To accommodate those employees who don't want to move, Kolaitis said the FDA intends to re-assign them to other jobs in their current locations and possibly use them to train their replacements at the new locations.

Waldrop of the consumer federation was unconvinced.

"If they're keeping people on and re-assigning them, they're still paying that person's salary, plus the new person you have to put in the lab, so where does that money come from in an agency that's strapped for cash?"

The FDA plan has faced skepticism in part because it was being implemented without input from Congress. Kolaitis said she now expects congressional hearings on the matter after more than 50 members of Congress asked the agency to halt the plan until it could be reviewed.

The plan was first revealed in December by an agency employee who leaked an internal e-mail on the proposal to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit advocacy and service organization.

Similar plans have been floated at the FDA since the mid-1980s, and the agency decided in 1994 to go from 18 labs to 13. But a report by the Government Accountability Office determined that while the 1994 downsizing "could yield efficiencies, we found that the documentation and estimates of the benefits resulting from consolidation are questionable."

Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, said the FDA has again failed to explain how the proposed lab closings would improve the agency.

"If they have a good programmatic reason for doing it that explains why they'll be better at the end of the day, why keep it a secret? Why not lead with it? If they do that, I don't think you'll hear a peep of protest."

The lack of transparency has made lawmakers bristle as well.

In a letter to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the FDA apparently decided to mislead the committee in a Dec. 26 letter that claimed that the restructuring plan hadn't been finalized and that "therefore, there are no changes to (FDA's) current laboratory structure."

Dingell later learned the FDA had disclosed the plan in November to a union that represents affected workers. "The refusal of the FDA to provide Congress with accurate information in response to the request by a Committee Chairman is completely unacceptable," Dingell wrote.

He has asked the FDA to provide all records relating to the plan since January 2005.

China Not Sole Source of Dubious Food
July 12, 2007
China Not Sole Source of Dubious Food
By ANDREW MARTIN and GRIFF PALMER
New York Times

Black pepper with salmonella from India. Crabmeat from Mexico that is too filthy to eat. Candy from Denmark that is mislabeled.

At a time when Chinese imports are under fire for being contaminated or defective, federal records suggest that China is not the only country that has problems with its exports.

In fact, federal inspectors have stopped more food shipments from India and Mexico in the last year than they have from China, an analysis of data maintained by the Food and Drug Administration shows.

China has had much-publicized problems with contaminated seafood ?- including a temporary ban late last month on imports of five species of farm-raised seafood from China ?- but federal inspectors refused produce from the Dominican Republic and candy from Denmark more often.

For instance, produce from the Dominican Republic was stopped 817 times last year, usually for containing traces of illegal pesticides. Candy from Denmark was impounded 520 times.

By comparison, Chinese seafood was stopped at the border 391 times during the last year.

"The reality is, this is not a single-country issue at all," said Carl R. Nielsen, who resigned from the Food and Drug Administration in 2005, after 28 years. His last job was director of the division of import operations and policy in the agency's Office of Regulatory Affairs. "What we are experiencing is massive globalization," he said.

The F.D.A. database does not necessarily capture a full and accurate picture of product quality from other countries. For one thing, only one year of data is available on the agency's Web site, and F.D.A. officials declined to provide more data without a formal Freedom of Information request, a process that can take months, if not years.

In addition, the F.D.A. inspects only about 1 percent of the imports that fall under its jurisdiction. So the agency may miss many of the products that are contaminated or defective. The F.D.A. database also fails to disclose the quantity of products that are refused, so it is impossible to know whether just a box of cucumbers was refused or a shipload.

In cases of recurrent problems, the F.D.A. may issue an import alert, which leads to additional scrutiny at the border. Last month, for instance, the F.D.A. issued not only the import alert for the Chinese fish, but also import alerts for Mexican cantaloupes and basmati rice from India, among others.

Rafael Laveaga, a spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, said the number of food safety problems from Mexican imports was minuscule given the huge volume of trade. He said that Mexican food products were scrutinized more thoroughly since they arrived by road transit, rather than by ship or airplane.

"The proactive and professional relationship that exists between Mexican authorities and the F.D.A. has always helped to expeditiously mitigate and control any potential risks," he said.

Banarshi Harrison, minister of commerce at the embassy of India, said India had recently strengthened its food safety laws. He said contamination of spices and pickles might occur on occasion because they were processed by many small manufacturers.

"There is really no evidence of a systematic problem for any particular product," he said.

Food safety officials from the Dominican Republic and Denmark could not be located for comment.

Despite the shortcomings with the F.D.A. database of import refusals, the available information makes clear that quality problems extend well beyond China, where officials recently admitted that nearly 20 percent of the country's products are substandard or tainted.

Critics say the F.D.A. has not changed to deal with the flood of imports in the last decade, as trade agreements have opened up borders to products from across the globe.

The United States imported $1.86 trillion in merchandise last year, compared with $1.14 trillion in 2001, a 63 percent increase, according to Commerce Department records.

An F.D.A. plan to revamp the way it inspects imports, called the Import Strategic Plan, was completed in 2003, but shelved because of budgetary constraints, several former F.D.A. officials said. The plan would have focused more on finding potential risks in the food supply using vast quantities of information ?- from inspectors and manufacturers to foreign governments and consumers ?- to aim at problem imports.

"It basically got deep-sixed," said William Hubbard, a former F.D.A. associate commissioner who resigned in 2005 and is now a part of a coalition that is advocating for more financing for the agency. "There was no capacity to cover as imports went up," he said.

Noting that the number of import shipments has vastly increased in the last 15 years, he said: "That's a huge, huge increase and they've lost people. These guys are going to war without enough troops. They don't even have guns."

Nancy M. Childs, a professor of food marketing at St. Joseph University in Philadelphia, said the quality problems were an inevitable result of companies pursuing the cheapest possible products.

"As long as we are pushing for the lowest price all the time, driving our supply chain, you get more efficient," she said. "But at a certain point there is no more efficiency and you sacrifice quality."

Ms. Childs added that countries that produce the cheapest products often have little regulation and lackluster enforcement.

Dr. David Acheson, the F.D.A.'s assistant commissioner for food protection, agreed that the agency's system for reviewing imports was antiquated and needed to be changed. He said that the F.D.A. should revise its domestic food safety strategy to focus more on prevention rather than simply reacting to crises.

The agency, he said, was currently working on a plan to revise how it monitored food safety, both for domestic food and imported, which should be released in the fall. The plan will depend on the F.D.A. working with foreign governments and American companies to identify potential risks to the food supply before they reach ports in the United States.

"Fundamentally, starting at the border is not where we need to be," he said.

The F.D.A. inspects foreign shipments of food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices, animal drugs and some electronic devices.

From July 2006 through June of this year, agency inspectors stopped 2,723 shipments of all such items from China, followed closely by India, 2,620; Mexico, 1,876; and the Dominican Republic, 887.

But China sends more products into the United States than any of those countries, at least in terms of the dollar value. In 2006, for instance, China shipped $288 billion in merchandise to the United States, compared with $198 billion from Mexico; $22 billion from India; and $5.3 billion from the Dominican Republic, records show.

Salmonella was the top reason that food was rejected from India, and it was found in products like black pepper, coriander powder and shrimp. "Filthy" was the primary reason food was stopped from Mexico, and the rejections included lollipops, crabmeat and dried chili.

Products from the Dominican Republic were mostly stopped because of pesticides.