Posted on 06/09/2007 5:47:17 AM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
BEIJING (AP) - China said Saturday it had rejected a shipment of pistachios from the United States because it contained a potentially harmful variety of ants, the latest indication that the country may be going on the offense as its own products were being turned away over safety fears.
The move came a day after the Chinese food safety watchdog announced that shipments of health supplements and raisins from the U.S. had been returned or destroyed because they did not meet quality control standards.
On Saturday, state television showed inspectors in the southern province of Guangdong rejecting a two-ton shipment of pistachios because they contained what the report called "milky white ants," which looked similar to termites.
China Central Television said the ants could "cause a serious threat to trees and to the ecological environment." Part of the batch, which arrived by ship to the port of Zhongshan, will be destroyed and the rest will be returned, CCTV said, without giving any other details.
Footage showed inspectors wearing face masks while bagging samples and sealing the shipping container the pistachios were in. The report also showed safety certificates from the U.S. issued to Cal-Pure Pistachios Inc., based in Bakersfield, California.
Telephone calls to Guangdong quarantine officials rang unanswered on Saturday.
China's shaky food safety record has come under scrutiny in recent months following the deaths of cats and dogs in the United States and Canada blamed on tainted Chinese pet food ingredients.
Since then, U.S. inspectors have banned or turned away a growing number of Chinese exports - from monkfish to juice to toothpaste - because they contained life-threatening levels of toxins or unsafe chemicals.
While it's not immediately clear if China's latest actions were taken in retaliation or if they were part of regular inspections, the report on state television indicates there's an increasing push to show that other countries also have food safety issues.
The Web site of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, China's food safety agency, showed lists of products from 2006 and 2007 that had been turned away from countries including the United States, Canada, Japan, Singapore and Italy because they did not meet Chinese standards.
Late last month, France's Groupe Danone SA said China seized five containers of Evian water in February because of concern over high bacteria levels.
The U.S. FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection, Dr. David Acheson, said Friday that U.S. officials were seeking more information on the latest cases of American products being turned away.
"Whatever the motives are for this, if it's real, we want to know about it," Acheson said.
"Is it tit-for-tat? We don't know and probably won't ever know. If they found a legitimate problem with a product exported from the United States, we would want to know about it so we can look into it and fix it."
The Chinese quality supervision administration said Friday that inspectors in the ports of Ningbo and Shenzhen found bacteria and sulfur dioxide in health capsules and raisins shipped by K-Max Health Products Co., CMO Distribution Center of America, Inc., and Supervalu International Division. K-Max and CMO exported health capsules, including bee pollen and bacteria-fighting supplements. Supervalu exported Sun-Maid Golden Raisins, it said on its Web site. The shipments from K-Max and Supervalu have been destroyed and CMO's capsules were returned, the notice said. The Chinese announcement did not specify which contaminants were found in which products, saying only that they were found in amounts above acceptable levels.
It urged local authorities to step up inspections of imported food products and said Chinese importers should clarify food safety demands in contracts when importing U.S. food products, so as to lower the trade risk.
Yep.
LLS
The FDA on Wednesday said it alerted manufacturers of feed for livestock, fish and shrimp to a voluntary recall of products made by Tembec BTLSR Inc. of Toledo, Ohio. The FDA said Tembec had added melamine, an agent that is used in plastics and fire retardants but is unfit for use in food, to animal-feed ingredients to improve the products’ texture.
Here in Houston our manufacturing base is plenty busy with petrochem/oil biz as well as an amazing array of other products. My men started plating parts at 0500 this a.m. and will be here tomorrow as well because we have four rush orders to finish by Monday. Our turnaround cannot be beat and our quality is far above the imported stuff. No one wants to risk his life with a part machined overseas when the part will see 25000 PSI. I often cadmium plate aircraft fasteners that ship out to Brazil, Germany, or Japan.
Cal-Pure Pistachios Inc., based in Bakersfield, California.
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Well,,,there’s the problem rite there !! Don’t those people know not to eat stuff from California !! HEY CHINEZZ FOLKS,
Don’t Eat The “Spinige” Neither !! (it’s got POO on it);0)
hee hee
I’ll take ants over poison any day.
At least the illegal drugs they’re shipping us seem to be of good quality....
Nobody ever got sick or died from ants at a picnic...;0)
I thought the EPA chased all the cad platers out of the country. Is that all you plate?
I thought milky white ants were a delicacy in China. :)
I plate zinc and cadmium. We also passivate stainless, apply phosphate, spray teflon, molykote, anodize, and alodine. No the EPA cannot outlaw cad plating. It is essential to a number of industries especially marine and aircraft.
I plate hard chrome - EPA &OSHA are trying damn hard to make it impossible to continue in the US.
Oddly enough I just got back from China. China’s food supply is an odd mixture of extreme sanitary precautions as they cope with SARS, and the more normal older way of pretty filthy conditions. For example, the open air farmer’s markets have uncooked meats chopped and lying on tables with no cooling or packaging. Intestines are strung over strings. There were split dogs and split rats hung from hooks, although I have heard from my Chinese friends that the rats are illegal. Fish are farmed in nets in rivers, and I am not sure how much sewage treatement goes on in the area before the sewage goes into the river. In other words, given anything in the open air markets, and the ants, I’d bet on the ants being cleaner. One of the more sanitary things about the market is that much of the animals are alive in cages, and therefore not decomposing.
Just like mom used to make.....
Me, too.. I’ve never bought pistacios with ants...
We *must* tell our illegals to do a better job...
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