Ways That Are Dark

Debate over China’s poor food safety record is heating up with the FDA effectively blocking the import of five types of farmed fish. It has been reported by The New York Times that:

Chinese goods make up about 22 percent of United States seafood imports. But they accounted for about 63 percent of the shipments that were refused by the F.D.A. last year for having animal drug residues.

China has vowed food safety changes, but has not yet specified what those changes may be. Online discussion seems to suggest a food safety agreement with China is not only desirable, but an urgent necessity. Check out the hundreds of responses on The Times Reader’s Comments on this issue.

Farmed seafood has now joined tires, toothpaste and toy trains on the list of tainted and defective products from China that could be hazardous to human health. The US Food and Drug Administration said it would block the import of farmed Chinese seafood until importers could prove the shipments were free of unsafe contaminants.

“I think we have reached a point unfortunately where ‘made in China’ is now a warning label in the United States,” Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, a top campaigner in the US Congress for tighter food safety laws, said recently.

Article source: ‘Made in China’ now a warning label, says US.

The New York Times reports:

China manufactured every one of the 24 kinds of toys recalled for safety reasons in the United States so far this year, including the enormously popular Thomas & Friends wooden train sets, a record that is causing alarm among consumer advocates, parents and regulators…The toys were coated at a factory in China with lead paint, which can damage brain cells, especially in children.

Given the recent scares of Chinese made pet foods, tires, toothpaste and medicines, this trend becoming increasingly alarming.

“These are items that children are supposed to be playing with,” said Prescott Carlson, co-founder of a Web site called the Imperfect Parent, which includes a section that tracks recalls of toys and other baby products. “It should be at a point where companies in the United States that are importing these items are held liable.”

The complete article at The Times is As More Toys Are Recalled, Trail Ends in China.

On June 21, The New York Times reported on the Chinese media dropping its coverage of child slavery in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province. As often is the case in China, once the culprit is captured, the story disappears from view.

The villain in the case was Heng Tinghan, the manager of the brick works, who was arrested Saturday and promptly cemented his bad-guy image by protesting that it was a “fairly small thing” to beat and abuse underage workers, and to deprive them of pay. With his arrest, and the urging of the Central Office of External Communication of the Communist Party, the story then died away.

The article also reports:

Just within a week or so of the brick kiln story, there were several reports of labor abuses against children. A 14-year-old boy was killed in an explosion while filling a tank with napthalene at a chemical factory near Nanjing. A 15-year-old boy was dragged into a cotton gin and crushed to death in Nanchang after working a succession of 20-hour days. And 70 girls from rural Henan Province were brought by their teacher to work at a grape processing plant in Ningbo, where their hands bled from working 16-hour shifts.

The complete Times story is Fast-Growing China Says Little of Child Slavery’s Role.