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China Food Mislabeled, U.S. Says
By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: May 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/business/worldbusiness/03food.html
SHANGHAI, May 2 — A Chinese company accused of
selling contaminated wheat gluten to American pet
food suppliers avoided inspections partly because it
did not correctly disclose its shipping contents to
Chinese export authorities, according to American
regulators.
The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development
Company, one of two Chinese companies at the center
of the huge recall of pet food that has killed or
sickened thousands of animals, shipped more than 700
tons of wheat gluten labeled as nonfood products
this year through a third-party Chinese textile
company.
By listing the goods as nonfood items, the company’s
shipments were not subject to mandatory inspection
by the Chinese government. Though a possible
violation of export policies, such mislabeling is
thought to be widespread in China.
The details of the case, some of them disclosed on
Friday in a circular released by the Food and Drug
Administration, are just the latest clues that
Chinese feed suppliers may have been intentionally
disguising the contents of their goods.
F.D.A. officials are now visiting China to seek more
information about how and why an industrial chemical
used in plastics and fertilizer got mixed into pet
food ingredients.
American regulators admit that six weeks after one
of the biggest pet food recalls in United States
history, they still do not know who in China
manufactured the contaminated pet food ingredients
or where in China the contamination took place.
Though the agency has named two Chinese companies as
the suppliers of the tainted vegetable protein sent
to the United States, regulators suspect the
companies may not have been manufacturing the feed,
but buying it from dozens of other feed
manufacturers in China.
Those feed producers, regulators say they believe,
may have intentionally mixed melamine into the feed
to inflate artificially the level of protein in the
bags to meet pet food requirements.
“Records relating to the importation of these
products indicate that these two firms had
manufactured the ingredients in question,” the F.D.A.
said in an import alert released last Friday. “There
is strong evidence, however, that these firms are
not the actual manufacturers. Moreover, despite many
weeks of investigation, it is still unknown who the
actual manufacturer or manufacturers of the
contaminated products imported from China are.”
Worried that the contaminant may continue to enter
the United States and also seep into the human food
supply through food additives, regulators have
blocked all Chinese imports of wheat gluten and
warned importers to screen nearly every other kind
of food and feed additive entering the United States
from China, including corn gluten and soy protein.
Last week, the F.D.A. and the Agriculture Department
issued a joint warning to consumers saying that
melamine has found its way into hog and chicken
feed, encouraging producers to destroy the animals,
even though there is no clear evidence that
consuming meat from the animals is a danger to human
health.
American regulators are now under growing pressure
to ensure the safety of human and pet food and to
get to the bottom of the melamine scare.
But what began as a pet food recall on March 16
involving two factories working for a single pet
food maker, Menu Foods, has now expanded to include
some of America’s leading pet food brands and over
60 million pet food packages.
The two Chinese companies named by American
regulators last month have said little publicly
since the recall. Both companies are based in
eastern China, near one of the country’s biggest
wheat-growing regions and also one of the centers of
melamine production.
Melamine is an industrial chemical that animal feed
producers here say has been intentionally mixed into
feed to trick farmers into thinking they are buying
higher protein meal, even though the chemical has no
nutritional value.
A similar practice once took place in the United
States and in China involving a related compound
called urea, but that compound is now more widely
tested for and is banned from certain feeds in the
United States.
“This was standard stuff after World War II, when
animal feed was adulterated with urea,” said Marion
Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food and public
health at New York University. “This is simple
greed. It’s like they’re adding water to the wheat
gluten.”
The Chinese government has told American regulators
that Xuzhou is not a manufacturer of wheat gluten
but purchased its products from 25 manufacturers.
ChemNutra, the Las Vegas pet food supplier that
bought the wheat gluten from Xuzhou and then resold
it to pet food makers in North America, also said it
was led to believe Xuzhou was the manufacturer of
the product.
But ChemNutra officials also say that they received
the shipments of wheat gluten through a third party,
a company called Suzhou Textiles Silk Light and
Industrial Products.
A spokesman for Suzhou Textiles denied that the
company exported any wheat gluten to the United
States
The other supplier of contaminated protein named by
regulators is Binzhou Futian Biology Technology,
which says that it supplies soy, corn and other
proteins and has strong sales in the United States,
Europe and Southeast Asia. The company also declined
to comment.
The Chinese government said last week that it was
unlikely melamine could have harmed so many pets in
the United States. But on Friday, China banned
melamine from use in any vegetable protein for
export or for use in the domestic food market.
The F.D.A. says that it has received reports that
more than 4,000 cats and dogs died as a result of
eating pet food that may have been laced with
melamine.
Scientists are now struggling to determine why
melamine, a chemical that is not believed to be
toxic, may have turned poisonous.
Some scientists theorize that melamine mixed with
other melaminelike compounds, like cyanuric acid,
created a poisonous substance.
And that possibility may be all the more likely
because many animal feed producers in China are not
using pure melamine but impure melamine scrap that
is sold more cheaply as the waste product after
melamine is produced by chemical and fertilizer
factories here.
“It’s possible the other stuff they were left with
was the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, leftover
melamine and possibly cyanuric acid,” said Richard
Goldstein, an assistant professor at the Cornell
University College of Veterinary Medicine. “I think
it’s this melamine with other compounds that is
toxic.” |
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