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Pet Deaths Spur Call for Better FDA Screening
Suppliers in China have admitted to adding melamine to animal feed. The FDA is trying to screen out the additive, which is now blamed for many pet deaths..
(Associated Press)
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About 99 percent of imported foods are simply acknowledged by computer and waved ashore.
Inspections were easier when imports were identifiable foods. Products that looked like oranges were clearly oranges, even if they sometimes had to be tested for pesticides. Raspberries were raspberries, even if some were tainted with bacteria.
But processed ingredients are often nondescript. And in China, where a national passion for commerce has far outpaced the adoption of regulatory controls, marketers have repeatedly been caught adulterating such products -- spiking pig feed with diet pill chemicals to make swine leaner, for example, and hiding sawdust in fishmeal.
Officials at Chinese companies that make melamine, which is used in plastics but can also give falsely elevated readings of a food's nutritional value, have acknowledged that the chemical is sometimes sold to makers of animal food ingredients.
"It's always been like that, people buying it as animal feed," said Xu Qin Bin, a sales representative for Shandong Sanhe Chemical Co.
Other melamine brokers said the standard policy is, in effect, one of "don't ask, don't tell."
"As long as you bring money, anyone can buy," said Zhao Yan of the Shandong Taian Ningyang County Weiye Chemical Co., which markets melamine.
A recent shift from old-fashioned trade fairs to online trading has facilitated this shadowy market by adding a layer of anonymity between producers and consumers.
By far the largest online marketplace in China, and perhaps the world, is Alibaba.com. It is based in the southeastern city of Hangzhou and specializes in business-to-business transactions. On Alibaba, buyers can order garden gnomes, customized political campaign buttons, bolts of taffeta, as well as wheat gluten and other foodstuffs -- all with a click of a mouse.
On a typical day, Alibaba vendors advertise about 1.75 million individual products, more than 30,000 of them agricultural.
Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co., the two companies under investigation by Chinese and U.S. officials, sell vegetable proteins on Alibaba. Scores of others hawk wheat gluten, rice protein or corn gluten -- virtually all advertising their products as high-quality "feed grade," "food grade" or "export grade" and none offering inferior "industrial" grade.
In its ad, Xuzhou Anying, which American authorities say supplied toxic wheat gluten to pet food makers, does not specify what uses its wheat gluten is meant for. But it cites "feed additives" as one of its main exports and claims that its gluten is "reference grade three a" -- a term that FDA officials say has no formal regulatory meaning.
