Despite Warnings, China’s Regulators Failed to Stop Milk

Despite Warnings, China’s Regulators Failed to Stop Milk
China Photos, via Getty Images
The tainted-milk crisis has devastated China’s dairy industry. Farmers
in Hubei Province poured out milk they could not sell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/world/asia/27milk.html?th&emc=th

By JIM YARDLEY and DAVID BARBOZA
Published: September 26, 2008
SHIJIAZHUANG, China — Barely a month ago, China’s staging of the
Beijing Olympics demonstrated how the Communist Party could mobilize
its authoritarian political system. But the international scandal now
unfolding over China’s contaminated dairy products is demonstrating,
again, the weaknesses of that system.

In recent days, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has apologized for a scandal
that has sickened 53,000 children, killed at least three and
devastated China’s dairy industry, which he has promised to reform.

But a year ago, Mr. Wen made a similar pledge to overhaul safety
regulations for food, drugs and other products in response to other
safety scandals. His government authorized $1.1 billion and sent
300,000 inspectors to examine food and drug producers, but regulators
could not prevent China’s biggest dairy producers from selling baby
formula laced with an industrial additive called melamine.

The dairy scandal raises the core question of whether the ruling
Communist Party is capable of creating a transparent, accountable
regulatory structure within a one-party system. Party leaders realize
that effective regulation is essential to convince the world that
China’s products are safe and so maintain the rapid economic growth
that has helped to sustain the party’s power. But many analysts say
the party’s need to maintain control — of the economy and of
information — undermines the independence of any regulatory system.

Beijing’s political priority of holding a “harmonious” Olympics was
also a factor. Parents who tried to act as whistle-blowers were
thwarted by an unresponsive bureaucracy, while Chinese journalists
were blocked by censorship edicts banning coverage of politically
touchy subjects during the prelude to the Olympics.

Officials now acknowledge that China’s leading dairy companies —
including the Sanlu Group, the worst offender in the scandal — were
exempted from mandatory government inspections. In hindsight,
inspections might not have mattered: in May, the government’s top food
quality agency rated dairy companies among the safest producers in
China’s food industry, reporting that 99 percent of them passed safety
inspections for their infant milk formula. Now, the government says
that 22 dairy companies, including export brands like Mengniu and
Yili, have produced powdered baby formula that contains traces of
melamine.

“The system needs to be re-examined, top to bottom,” said Eliot R.
Cutler, an expert on regulation and energy policy at the Beijing
office of Akin Gump, an international law firm.

Much of the public outrage in China over the dairy scandal is focused
on how the problem remained hidden for months as parents bought bad
formula without realizing they were poisoning their babies. Beijing
authorities say they learned about the problem only this month. They
have blamed greedy corporations and local officials for wrongly hiding
the crisis. But there were early warnings that were muffled by
censorship or lapses in Beijing.

Fu Jianfeng, an editor at one of China’s leading independent
publications, Southern Weekend, recently used a personal blog to
describe how his newsweekly discovered cases of sickened children in
July — two months before the scandal became public — but could not
publish articles so close to the Games.

“As a news editor, I was deeply concerned,” Mr. Fu wrote on Sept. 14.
“I had realized that this was a large public health disaster, but I
was not able to send reporters to do reporting.”

Even earlier, on June 30, a mother in Hunan Province had written a
detailed letter pleading for help from the food quality agency, the
General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and
Quarantine. The letter, posted on the agency’s Web site, described
rising numbers of infants at a local children’s hospital who were
suffering from kidney stones after drinking powdered formula made by
Sanlu.

The mother said she had already complained in vain to Sanlu and local
officials.

“Urgent! Urgent! Urgent!” she wrote. She called on Beijing authorities
to order a product recall, release the news to the Chinese media and
provide medical exams for babies who had consumed Sanlu formula.
“Please investigate whether the formula does have problems,” she
wrote, “or more babies will get sick.”

1 2 3 Next Page »
Chen Yang, Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research.
.

Loading