China’s Food Safety Problems

Why Americans Should Worry About China’s Food Safety Problems

By Stanley Lubman
If a diner in the U.S. consumes a lunch of tilapia, mushrooms and spinach, there’s a decent chance the entire meal was imported from China. And the overwhelming odds are that none of those foods were inspected by the Food and Drug Administration when they arrived in the U.S.
This week’s revelation that nearly half the rice sold in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou was found to be tainted with cadmium is just the latest in a long string of eye-catching stories that illustrate the dangers of eating in China. But lost in the exhaustive media coverage of the polluted foods that find their way on to Chinese tables are serious questions about what happens — or doesn’t happen — when Chinese food products make their way into the U.S.
Chinese food product imports to the U.S. are continuing to rise, but inspections in both China and the U.S. aren’t keeping pace, posing a growing danger to consumers. Many of the imports are used by restaurants, institutions and food processors; as a result, consumers see no labels, keeping them unaware of the origins of what they’re ingesting.

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Chinese imports dominate some food categories to a striking extent. In a testimony before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in May (pdf), food safety expert Patty Lovera noted that China accounted for 80% of tilapia, 51% of cod, 49% of apple juice, 34% of processed mushrooms, 27% of garlic and 16% of frozen spinach consumed in the U.S. in 2011.
Reports on the state of Chinese food processing establishments are discouraging. More than half of food processing and packaging firms on the Chinese mainland failed safety inspections in 2011, according to a report by Asia Inspection, a China-based food quality control company. Meanwhile, in the U. S., inspections of imported food products are minute compared to the total volume of imports. According to a recent study by the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee in 2011, FDA inspections were a mere 2.3 % of the total of all imported food products (pdf).
The same study states that food imports generally have risen 10% annually since 2004, and are continuing to rise (imports grew from $399 million in 2011 to $426 million in 2012). The FDA estimates that food imports from China and India will grow by 9% annually between 2010 and 2020.
The flow of reports in recent years from domestic and foreign sources alike about serious violations of food safety in China has been continuous and alarming. In the last year alone, the country has seen thousands of dead pigs show up in a major river, faced multiple milk scandals and busted operations that were passing off rat meat as mutton. In addition, as Patty Lovera told Congress, there is “widespread smuggling of products like honey to avoid tariffs and food safety restrictions [and] mislabeled products ‘transshipped’ through another country but produced in China.”
Food safety problems are, of course, not only a concern to the U.S. The German magazine Der Spiegel recently posted online a list of “rejected food” imported into the EU from China during 2012, including insect-infested potatoes, rabbit meat loaded with antibiotics, oyster sauce with staphylococcus, salmonella-infected ginger, pumpkin seeds contaminated with glass chips and arsenic in frozen calamari.
American history of the late 19th and early 20th century reminds us that periods of rapid economic growth stimulate fraud and deception in food processing, which leads to increased regulation. As I noted in an earlier column, it wasn’t until author Upton Sinclair aroused public concern with “The Jungle,” his 1906 book on conditions in the Chicago meat packaging industry, that President Theodore Roosevelt moved to create the FDA.
An ongoing cooperative agreement between the United States and China on attacking common food safety should theoretically provide a foundation on which effective actions could be taken to help deal with quality issues in products destined for the U.S. First signed in 2007, the agreement between the FDA and China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine was renewed for another five years in December.
Under the terms of the agreement, the FDA conducts workshops on U.S. requirements for certain high-risk foods such as farm-raised fish and engages in outreach that enhances Chinese food safety officials’ understanding of American standards and practices. After signing the original agreement, the FDA also opened offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, but that has not led to significantly increased inspections of Chinese food facilities, which totaled only 85 in 2011.
The current relative coolness of U.S.-China relations suggests that prospects of increasing official cooperation, involving even the non-political issue of food safety, are slim. Against that background, Congress might do well to consider increasing the FDA’s budget for inspections. Meanwhile, U.S. foundations, NGOs and government agencies should explore the possibility of funding Chinese NGOs that focus on improving food safety in China. With Chinese regulators seeming unable to control contamination, it may fall to the country’s increasingly rights-conscious citizens to force better enforcement of food safety laws.
Stanley Lubman, a long-time specialist on Chinese law, is a Distinguished Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He is the author of “Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao” (Stanford University Press, 1999) and editor of “The Evolution of Law Reform in China: An Uncertain Path” (Elgar, 2012).