HEALTH-CHINA: Dead Serious on Food and Drug Safety

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, May 30 2007 (IPS) - China has confirmed the seriousness of recent international scares about rampant fraud and counterfeiting in its booming economy in a most dramatic way – by sentencing to death the country’s former top drug regulator.

Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of the State Food and Drug Administration, was convicted of taking bribes and failing to curb a scandalous market in fake and dangerous medicines. A Beijing court awarded the death sentence Tuesday morning.

The extreme punishment comes after weeks of heightened fears about the quality and safety of Chinese agricultural and pharmaceutical goods. China, which earns more than 30 billion US dollars a year from food and drug exports to Asia, North America and Europe, has been recently bombarded with complaints from all over the globe alleging shoddy quality and dangerous substances.

Reports have described prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption, frozen shrimp preserved with substances like nitrofuran that can cause cancer, and mushrooms sprayed with illegal pesticides.

The string of scandals over Chinese contaminated exports were triggered by disclosures that thousands of pets in the United States and Canada had died after eating pet food tainted with the chemical melamine. The substance, which is used in fertilisers, had mysteriously found its way into wheat gluten exported from China for the U.S. pet food and animal feed markets.

Close on the heels of the highly publicised contamination of pet food came reports that China has also exported counterfeit drug ingredients. At least 100 deaths in Panama have been linked to a cough medicine tainted with a poisonous industrial solvent, diethylene glycol, that was traced to an unlicensed factory in eastern China.

As a response to growing alarm at home over safety standards of Chinese goods, the U.S. government has ordered the largest pet food recall in the U.S. history. It has also stopped all imports of Chinese toothpaste following reports that some products sold in the Dominican Republic and Panama contained diethylene glycol.

While international uproar over fake and substandard Chinese exports is unprecedented, domestic consumers in the country have faced endemic problems associated with food and drugs for years. Indeed many of China’s food safety problems have only come to international attention because of China’s increasing food exports.

Three years ago a ban on transparent “glass” noodles was issued after certain brands were found to be using a lead-based whitener. Dangerously-contaminated consignments of counterfeit milk powder, discovered on the Chinese market, were blamed for the deaths of at least 12 infants in rural China.

Last year, a posting spread by millions of Internet users mocked the daily struggle of Chinese consumers as they negotiated a minefield of hazardous foods and goods, dining on “chemically contaminated rice and pesticide-infested vegetables” and drinking beer contaminated with formaldehyde. In 2006 food poisoning claimed 196 lives, according to official figures from the ministry of health.

“We used to love buying home-made honey from the peasants in villages outside of Beijing, but now we are scared even to try it,” says Feng Xiaohua, an avid mountaineer who spends her weekends in the countryside. “We are probably wrong though, because it is the corrupt officials we have to fear and not the poor peasants.”

Zheng Xiaoyu is the highest-ranking official to be implicated and punished in Beijing’s struggle to address public concerns over rampant culture of counterfeiting in the country’s economy.

During his tenure as China’s chief drug and food official from 1997 to 2006, Zheng is said to have accepted bribes in cash and gifts worth some 850,000 dollars. In exchange for these favours he had approved six types of medicines that were found to be fake. In one instance, an antibiotic, approved by Zheng’s agency, killed at least 11 patients last August before it was taken off the market.

The death sentence was appropriate said the court, according to reports by the state agency Xinhua, given the “huge bribes involved and the great damage inflicted on the country and the public by Zheng’s dereliction of duty.”

Chinese commentators have appraised the harsh sentence as a warning to all corrupt officials. “The sentence reflects the concern of top Chinese officials about issues such corruption and food safety,” He Bing, a professor at China University of Political Science and Law, told Xinhua.

Yet beyond the execution of a highly publicised death sentence lies the uneasy task of tackling what many experts see as an unbridled abuse of power and widespread counterfeiting.

A published survey by the quality inspection administration revealed that a third of China’s 450,000 food production companies were unlicensed. An overwhelming 60 percent of these companies did not have any quality control mechanism in place, while some 29 percent of them had no “quality labels” on their products, the survey found.

In addition to the domestic health problems they cause, food safety lapses have now shown to present a threat to a significant Chinese source of trade revenue. It is the risk of Chinese exports being rejected in more and more markets around the world that is now forcing authorities to improve standards to which Chinese food and drugs are being produced.

Faced with an avalanche of complaints, the country’s main quality control agency announced this week its first recall system of unsafe food products. The system will be put in place gradually and will focus on “potentially dangerous and unapproved food products,” an official from the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine was quoted as saying by the ‘China Daily’.

“All domestic and foreign food producers and distributors will be obliged to follow the system,” Wu Jianping, director general of the administration’s food production and supervision department, told the daily.

Experts argue though that it is not the lack of regulations that is to blame for the food safety accidents. What is at issue is their enforcement. After all, the country already has over 200 individual food safety laws, regulations and standards at national and regional level. None of these however, covers the entire process – from food-making to serving the food in the restaurants and retailing it in the shops.

The country is only now drafting its first national law on food safety, which has been part of legislative deliberations since 2003. But even if the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, approves the law by the end of this year as planned, there remains a question about which agency would be put in charge of its implementation. Currently, a dozen or so government watchdogs are responsible for supervising the industry.