China’s Food Safety Woes Now a Global Concern
April 16th, 2007Via: MSNBC:
The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.
Yet, it took a much more obscure item, contaminated wheat gluten, to focus U.S. public attention on a very real and frightening fact: China’s chronic food safety woes are now an international concern.
In recent weeks, scores of cats and dogs in America have died of kidney failure blamed on eating pet food containing gluten from China that was tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilizers and flame retardants. While humans aren’t believed at risk, the incident has sharpened concerns over China’s food exports and the limited ability of U.S. inspectors to catch problem shipments.
Well, we can’t grow or harvest any food here in America. We have to import it from somewhere, and China is the closest place that can provide the food we need.
I found this article pretty scary. These two quotes were, perhaps, the core of it:
“Inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are able to inspect only a tiny percentage of the millions of shipments that enter the U.S. each year.
Even so, shipments from China were rejected at the rate of about 200 per month this year, the largest from any country, compared to about 18 for Thailand, and 35 for Italy, also big exporters to the U.S., according to data posted on the FDA’s Web site.â€
Francis S. Yes you can, America could very well support itself with foodstuffs due to it´s vast expanses of soil. The problem is that it´s so much cheaper to import than to actually pay your workers decent wages.