Posted on 08/18/2007 6:47:30 AM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
(BEIJING) - China sought to shore up its battered reputation as a global exporter Friday, releasing a policy paper that touted its past food safety record. The paper also noted the current campaign to crack down on bad food-processing practices.
The policy paper, issued by the information office of the Cabinet, the State Council, lists a series of achievements and planned measures, from establishing a national food recall system to increasing exchanges with quality officials in other countries.
Though the 39-page document broke little ground, its release underscores the communist leadership’s drive to salvage the “Made in China” label, which has been tarnished by months of quality scares.
“China is a responsible country,” said the State Council Information Office paper titled “The Situation of China’s Food Safety Quality.”
“The Chinese government has stepped up active measures in enhancing food quality and ensuring food safety to protect the interests of consumers in both China and other countries,” it said.
Chinese exports have been under fire, especially in the U.S., China’s most important export market. Regulators have turned up tainted pet food ingredients, adulterated seafood and toothpaste with potentially dangerous chemicals and drugs. Mattel Inc., the world’s biggest toy company, this week issued its second recall of Chinese-made toys this summer because of lead-tainted paint and tiny magnets that could be swallowed by children.
While initially reluctant to acknowledge there was a problem, authorities have since thrown themselves into the campaign to protect export industries and bolster the country’s image for next year’s Olympic Games in Beijing.
“China has not handled the crisis well so far, but its statements and actions show a desire for improvement,” said Gene Grabowski, a senior vice president at a Washington-based public relations firm, Levick Strategic Communications, which works with large food and consumer goods companies.
In recent weeks, government leaders and agencies have almost daily announced stringent measures to rectify the situation.
According to the policy paper, China exported 24 million tons of food last year to more than 200 countries, 13 percent more than in the same period in 2005. Seafood, vegetables and canned goods are among the most popular products, and Japan, the U.S. and South Korea are the three biggest importers, it said.
“For years, over 99 per cent of China’s food exports have been up to standard,” the paper said.
maybe they should execute some more high level bureaucrats!
/s
I find it utterly astounding that we import that much food from China.
We’re sitting on one of the most prolific agricultural areas of the world, with the highest tech equipment, medicinals, and farming knowledge, and we gotta bring over stuff from them?
Makes no sense to me.
What they promise to only use the best lead paint on my daughter’s toys? No sale!
That's because we're exporting our food to other countries.
All in the name of global economy. Gotta feed the beast.
This is how the Chinese will shape up. They are unethical, but they are also smart, and their greed outweighs their ethics. If customers demand high quality and safety, which we are as they move up the product ladder.. The Chinese will spend the big bucks to put in safety and quality.
And they don’t have much choice now, because a lot of other nations are coming up behind them in the mass produced cheap crap. Chinese wages are low by our standards but rising by 12% a year in real terms, and its pricing them out of the low end crap. Countries like the Southeast
Asians are stepping up there, sometimes with Chinese owned factories.
I don’t get it either, I thought for sure food would be one of comparative advantages in the new global economy. For all those strong reasons you gave. Our government is even ultra pro farming, unlike other industries where it tries to kill off our best companies.
My only guess is we decided to burn so much of our crop to make ethanol, that its pricing us out of some of the lower end food stuffs.
And reporters, can’t forget those pesky reporters.
China Industries International
their new corporate logo...
BUMP
Good luck with that, China. I, for one, am thankful you showed your true colors.
Actually it is up to us consumers to check recalls.
Since the news only has been playing up China, we have to check these other things that are recalled.
http://www.recalls.gov/recent.html
But still BOYCOTT CHINA!!!!!
Sure it makes sense; we import food, just like Iran imports gasoline. We also import illegal ailens to do the agricultural jobs, but if we get our food from China, what exactly are the illegals doing in those farm fields?
China Tries to Repair Its Reputation as an Exporter..
what reputation???...they export more shi-ite than the lib/dems at the the daily kos convention!!!!!
I have a fair-sized collection of bent screwdrivers from China from years past. But, this week I bought two blister pacs of self-tapping sheet metal screws identical except one was made in Taiwan and the other in China. If anything, the Chinese product actually looked better than the Taiwanese. Maybe one has to have a special attitude to care or notice how sheet metal self-tapping screws look.
“China Tries to Repair Its Reputation as an Exporter”
Right.
Next, they’ll be grinding up political prisoners and selling it to us as “grade-A beef.” The inhuman, commie bastards. They can keep their slave-labor produced, substandard crap.
When the scares started - pet food, tires, lead paint in toys, sewage-raised seafood, etc., we breathed a sigh of relief in our home. The diligent boycott of Chinese goods --including processed foods that might hide Chinese ingredients - has really paid off for our household. I say that sadly, not gleefully. I wish lead paint in the brain of NO child. Inhumane.
I read somewhere that American garlic costs $1.00 a pound. Chinese garlic is $0.50 a pound. That's a pretty big difference. Grocery stores owners aren't dummies. If Americans are willing to pay up for US garlic, grocery stores will stock it. It seems like so little money, but the problem is that it really adds up. A dollar here, a dollar there, and the typical $600 food bill for a family of four becomes $1200.
Unions are a wonderful thing - for people who are union workers. Everyone else pays for the "wonderful thing" union workers have in the form of higher prices. The trick with unions is that union workers only benefit if most other people aren't union workers - i.e. the great unwashed are on the outside (of the union) looking in. If everyone gets union wages, prices everywhere are uniformly higher, meaning nobody benefits from a higher living standard.
Let the Communists figure out how to build a real economy in their own country first without sucking ours dry with garbage that undercuts people playing by the rules here.
*shrug* Slave labor is even cheaper than illegal immigrant labor, and there are no costs associated with following pesky environmental or sanitation rules.
Just because a product is made in China doesn't mean it was manufactured by a Chinese company. The first Mattel toy recall was for toys made by a Hong Kong company located in China. Hong Kong has been in toys for a long, long time. It became a major player in the 1970's, where Made in Hong Kong became synonymous with cheap toys. When labor costs in Hong Kong skyrocketed in the '80's and '90's, they started moving their plants to China. The brand name Chinese imports (e.g. Mattel toys) are typically high-quality items either manufactured directly or via subcontract under tight scrutiny by the owners of the brand names. The Mattel recall was thus a very unusual situation.
Generic items like screws, though - you get what you pay for. For example, in China, they sell replacement plastic knobs for frying pan covers where the screws aren't rust-proof. There is no lower limit on quality in China. If you want better quality you have to pay more. But you can buy items that are far lower quality than available anywhere else (and also far cheaper).
For example, if you have to buy a gift for someone you don't particularly care for, would an expensive, well made item relay your sentiments? No. That's the market which cheap, made in China crap fills. :o)
More likely as pork. It’s called “long pig” for a reason...
The sheet metal screws were not particularly cheap. The price seems to be about 3X what it was three years ago the last time I bought some. What province or city they came from who knows, just made in China. They were a lot better than the machine screw nuts I bought last year, many of which were not threaded, most amazing and also made in China.
Christmas at our house is going to be awfully interesting, given as we're not buying any toys made in China.
Same here. I and my wife have had this discussion already. No Mattel and no CHICOM toys, I love my daughters to much to risk that.
California garlic bulbs were priced at $4.99 a pound at a D.C. Whole Foods market in mid-June. At the same time, a pack of five Chinese bulbs - about a pound - was just 79 cents at Great Wall supermarket in Falls Church, Va.
Source: Garlic: The International Wonder
translation..
For years, over 99% of China's tainted food exports went undetected. It was only after pets and people started dying that the inferior products were found out".
Yes, and Christopher Ranch, Gilroy, Ca., the garlic capital, the guru of garlic, chopped prepared garlic in a jar, MADE IN CHINA.
Check it out.
I suspect whatever says "Made in USA" or other country will have some Chinese components. Strictly for supply chain reasons. Because no one makes anything from soup to nuts any more - and China is a huge source of components for everything under the sun. I suspect it's not Mattel you have to worry about - it's all the other little companies that have less stringent inspection programs. These companies don't appear on the radar screen of newspaper editors because they don't sell enough toys.
What a load of hogwash.
If you think that a penny or two more for that box of corn flakes is pricing American food processors out of the "lower end foodstuffs" market, you obviously haven't a clue of just how little the cost of raw grains effects the overall cost of producing that box of cornflakes.
It is also GOOD that commodity prices rise to reflect the actual cost of producing these crops, rather than the taxpayers pay huge subsidies to farmers producing crops at below cost. Farmers might (someday) be able to actually make a living farming if commodity prices rise to reflect the actual cost of producing them, PLUS stop the government from picking the taxpayers pockets in order to pay subsidies to farmers.
The often wrongly stated "the price of milk is going to go up because corn is being used to make ethanol" is ridiculous.
First, Farmers grow their own corn, so market prices don't effect feed they grow for their own use, other than perhaps a couple dollars more for seed, if they weren't smart enough to save some from the last years crop. Second, if the dairy farmer is like most dairy farmers, he grow an excess of corn for the market, so he'll actually make more money due to higher commodity prices, which in turn will subsidize his dairy operation, which will actually reduce his overall costs to produce milk.
Plus,corn isn't the only crop used to make silage, It's use is a regional one. Corn isn't used where corn doesn't grow well. Barley and other grains are used instead.
I really don't know why people are against ethanol. It's a good additive to gasoline, burns cleaner, and if your car is set up properly, runs better.
People cry about being dependent on foreign oil, but when anything is done to reduce it, they whine some more. The infrastructure for alternative fuels has to be built if we are ever to reduce our oil imports. We have to start somewhere. Plus, increased crop demand is GOOD for the farmer, and GOOD for the economy over all, rather than a glut of commodities, farmers going broke, and all the related industry (farm machinery manufacturing, etc) dissapearing.
On the bright side, the cooking involved in making the canned, jarred and bottle products kills all the night-soil related pathogens and parasites.
Once again, our dogs died to save their masters.
Small wonder allah's Satan's minions hate them...
“Good luck with that, China. I, for one, am thankful you showed your true colors.”
yes...just in time for next year’s Olympics.
I wonder how many more poisons we’ll find in food, drugs, and toys between now and then.
I wonder how many stories the MSM will devote to the genocide China is committing on its own children -especially their little girls?
“If anything, the Chinese product actually looked better than the Taiwanese.”
The little kids in China have more experience.
I can assure you that Tyson doesn't grow its own corn. And most cattle farms don't grow their own feed. They rely on renting pastures from neighboring landowners for periods of time. The problem is that increasingly, these pastures being used to grow corn. Which raises the cost of renting pastures (due to the reduced supply of land available for grazing).
That's because metal prices have gone up. And with S.Korea, Japan, and other countries buying up all the scrap metal they can find, which is serious competition for China, they are going to go up even more in the years to come. This may translate into good news for our steel industry in the near future, which needs higher metal prices in order to re-open some doors.
That's because we ship the raw unprocessed product out instead of adding value (making more processed foodstuffs) here. Once again it's our high labor costs, taxes that drive those companies off shore.
We do the same thing however. We import raw product from other countries, add value to it and sell it back to them. (Lumber, steel, oil etc.) So we can't really complain about something we also do.
LMAO That's funny. Dead WRONG but funny. I don't know ANY beef farmers who DON'T make their own hay. Sure, they put their cows out to pasture during the sumer months, but they have to feed them in the winter as well.
"Finnishing" beef cattle is a dfferent game than dairy farming. That is usually done by the stockyard owner, where they are "sweetened" up using grains, tailings, chicken barn litter,- feeds they buy from a supplier,(a rendering plant ) and feed the cattle for a month or so before they go to the slaughter house.
However,I was talking specifically about DAIRY farmers and the price of milk, Dairy farmers who also make their own hay, as well as grow their own grains for mixing their own silage. That's what those tall, narrow things on dairy farms are, silos. Dairy farmers would go broke if they DIDN'T grow their own feeds and hay. I grew up on the farm, and still hobby farm. Plenty of my neighbors have dairy farms. I know the business well.
And there certainly isn’t any shortage of pasture. If there is ONE dairy farmer somewhere who’s shortsightedness resulted in a lack of pasture for his dairy cattle, that’s an idividual problem, not a reflection of the industry as a whole.
Thanks for your post.
It is so characteristic of communists to have such a low regard for human life.
“More likely as pork.”
You’re right...shudders. Yet another reason to boycott the totalitarian monsters in human form.
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