"Made in China" label battered by product scandals

By Ben Blanchard - REUTERS - via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
December 08, 2008

Milk, toothpaste, cough syrup, pet food, eels, blood thinner, car parts, pork, eggs, honey, chicken, dumplings, cooking oil and rice -- if you can fake it or taint it, you can almost guarantee it's happened in China.

A string of product safety scandals, including contaminated infant formula that is believed to have killed six babies and sickened thousands of others, have rocked the faith of shoppers, making them wary of buying products made in China despite the often cheaper price tag.

"I was physically disgusted when I saw it on the TV," said Sally Villegas, a mother of two in Australia, referring to the melamine - tainted infant formula scandal that came to light in September.

"If I'm shopping and I pick up a product made in China, yes I would put it back."

The melamine scandal was the latest in a string of recent high-profile safety problems that included lead paint on toy cars and contaminated Chinese-made blood thinner heparin which was blamed for fatalities in the United States and Germany and prompted a global recall early this year.

After each scandal, Beijing seemed to have the same response: launching a crackdown, destroying tainted goods on television, jailing a few officials and saying they "pay great attention" to the problem.

Trouble is, for all the government's efforts and exhortations, the scandals keep happening, and will likely keep on happening, due to lax rule enforcement, fragmented industries, widespread poverty and the sheer size of China, analysts say.

"I'm sure that there will be more. It's a near certainty. Not only in the fields that we've seen already, but in other ones," said Duncan Innes-Ker, a China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing.

"China faces a lot of problems because it is developing into a big but very poor economy, and obviously you can't have Western-style safety mechanisms in an economy where half the population doesn't earn much more than a couple of dollars a day," he added.

CHINESE PRODUCTS SHUNNED

Jin Biao, vice president of Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group, one of China's largest dairy producers, admitted the melamine problem had dented the country's already badly tattered reputation overseas.

"The contamination was our management problem. We must first resolve it without trying to pass the blame on to the farmers, or to society, or the country," he told Reuters.

Yili was named as one of 22 companies found to have produced drinking milk contaminated with melamine, though after thorough inspections China now insists the problem has been effectively removed from the dairy industry.

Melamine, a chemical used to make plastics, was added to infant formula to cheat quality control tests on protein levels. The scandal led to bans around the world on food containing Chinese dairy products.

The United States last month issued an import alert for Chinese-made food products, calling for foods to be stopped at the border unless importers can certify that they are either free of dairy goods or free of melamine.

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