|
News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
What Should the U.S. Do about China's Bad Milk?
The New York Times published a terrific op-ed today putting into historical context China's contaminated milk scandal. Some Chinese dairies are cutting milk with a toxic chemical called melamine. The bad milk has killed at least four infants and sickened thousands.
1850's New York saw a similar crisis, author Bee Wilson writes in the Times. Milk producers saw an opportunity to boost sales in a fast-growing city. They created swill milk, "a filthy, bluish substance milked from cows tied up in crowded stables adjoining city distilleries and fed the hot alcoholic mash left from making whiskey," Wilson writes.
Like China's melamine milk, producers added foreign substances to the swill milk with dire consequences:
This too was doctored — with plaster of Paris to take away the blueness, starch and eggs to thicken it and molasses to give it the buttercup hue of honest Orange County milk. This newspaper attributed the deaths of up to 8,000 children a year to this vile fluid.
The situations leading up to the two crises carry common traits: When food producers face great demand for their products, temptation rises; and the public is placed at risk when avarice bests responsibility.
Unfortunately, regulation does not move as swiftly as the market. To straighten out the situation in New York, Wilson writes, "It took stronger food laws, better policing, the advent of pasteurization and the passage of the Food and Drug Act in 1906, 50 years after the worst of swill milk." She adds, "Above all, it took decades, not months or years."
(Inertia still plagues the U.S. government, especially Congress. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group that works on food safety and other important causes, has a list of food safety bills currently pending in Congress. CSPI lists 12 different bills, not one of which has cleared the committee stage.)
So what does that mean for China? Is China decades away from meaningful regulation? It may just be. The Chinese government silences voices representing the public. Government watchdogs and independent advocates are suppressed, and journalists are never out of Beijing's crushing reach. "In China, journalists have known of the poison milk for months, but weren't allowed to spread the news because of the Olympics," Wilson writes.
That is why the U.S. government cannot afford to wait to keep American consumers safe. Congress should explore ways to improve the safety of imported foods, just like it did with imported toys this summer.
A new law reforming the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency in charge of toys, household products, and other non-food items, requires third-party testing and certification of imported children's products. The law allows regulators to keep dangerous toys out of American stores and, by extension, allows the U.S. to use its leverage as a major importer to force exporters like China to clean up their act.
Clearly, the federal government needs to cast a wider safety net to protect Americans from the dangers of contaminated food imports. The melamine contamination scandal has already spread into the U.K., where Cadbury has been forced to recall Chinese-made candies.
The 110th Congress sputtered in passing new laws to ensure a safer food supply. The 111th Congress will have to do better.
Posted by Matt Madia
|