Wal-Mart tests food in China after finding tainted donkey meat
By Lauren Coleman-Lochner
Bloomberg News
January 04, 2014
Wal-Mart Stores said it's adding DNA tests on food and considering legal action after discovering contaminated donkey meat in China from a local vendor.
Wal-Mart said Thursday in a statement that it withdrew all products from the supplier, Dezhou Fujude Food Company Ltd., after finding fox DNA in tested samples. Dezhou Fujude officials have been placed in criminal detention, Wal-Mart said.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has faced other food safety and labeling problems in China, including a 2012 citation by regulators for selling sesame oil and squid with hazardous levels of chemicals. Other Western companies in the Asian nation have also dealt with contamination concerns. Yum! Brand's Inc.'s KFC stores faced a customer backlash after a former supplier was investigated for selling chicken with too many antibiotics and an avian flu outbreak scared diners away.
"While this appears to be an isolated incident to select stores in China, our customers' trust is paramount for our business and we are deeply sorry for this incident," Wal-Mart said Thursday.
Donkey meat is "a popular delicacy in China,"the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer said.
Last year, Wal-Mart said it would invest $16.5 million over three years to upgrade food safety in China by adding a mobile food-inspection program and increasing supplier training.
Wal-Mart said it has boosted random testing in the past year and helped found the Food Fraud Think Tank to deter contamination.
A deal to end the shutdown and
avoid default looks within in reach—so
House Republicans are working around the clock to find a way to screw it up.
Here’s all the latest from Daily Kos today:
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What do you do when ALEC has made our food supply unsafe?
When do you stop listening to the KOCH-ROACHES?
After the lies of their Tea Baggers, the opposition to Cape Wind that promised CLEAN ENERGY and CLEAN AIR to Cape Cod, their lies about Obamacare, when do Americans smarten up and stop listening?
The other day there was this guy in a chicken suit on Pennsylvania Avenue protesting outside the White House. Silly, but the reason the chicken and other demonstrators had crossed the avenue was to deliver a petition of more than half a million names, speaking out against new rules the US Department of Agriculture wants to put into effect – bad rules that would transfer much of the work inspecting pork and chicken and turkey meat from trained government inspectors to the processing companies themselves. Talk about putting the fox in the henhouse!
The revised regulations also call for a substantial speeding up of the disassembly line along which workers use sharp knives and often painful, repetitive hand motions to cut up and clean carcasses of dirt, blood and other contaminants that can cause infection and sickness. Not only will this increase in speed – by 25 percent or more — raise the chance of injury, it makes it easier to miss anything wrong – even deadly — with the meat. To compensate for that, the rules also call for an increase in the use of antimicrobial chemicals sprayed on the meat — but those sprays may actually damage the health of the workers.Inspectors and meat packing employees report instances of asthma, burns, skin rashes, sinus trouble and other respiratory ailments, some of them severe. What’s more, when complaints were made about health or hygiene, the response from employers often came in the form of threats and reprimands.
According to the Agriculture Department, their plan will increase food safety, but early last month, the Government Accountability Office – the GAO — reported on a years-old pilot program for some of these new rules and determined that the data on which they were based was, in the words of The Washington Post, “incomplete and antiquated.” One study used data that was more than 20 years old.
The Agriculture Department says the new rules will save the Federal budget $30 million annually, but compared to the more than $256 million it will save the poultry industry every year, that’s chickenfeed. In reality, as Tom Philpott, the food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, succinctly put it: “…The Obama administration has been pushing a deregulatory sop to a powerful industry based on a shoddy analysis.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that “each year roughly one in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.” Every state in the union has seen an outbreak in foodborne illness over the last decade; men, women and children made sick by E.coli, salmonella and other pathogens in everything from meat to produce, cereal, even peanut butter. The progressive website Truthout notes that “Americans are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism… at an annual cost to the economy of nearly $80 billion.”
Boneless pork loins sit waiting to be packaged at a Dahl's grocery store in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
And yet, when Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act almost three years ago, designed to toughen standards, the representatives of the food industry – spending tens of millions in campaign contributions and lobbying money — went after it with a vengeance, delaying and watering the final version down so much that the Food and Drug Administration can barely function, its own inspectors unable to fulfill their duties. (The situation was made even worse by the government shutdown.)
In 2011, the FDA inspected only six percent of domestic food producers and less than half a percent of imported food – and this at a time when more and more of our food – including two thirds of our fresh fruits and vegetables – is coming from overseas.
Additional pressure on Congress and state legislatures comes from our old friend ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by Koch Industries and other corporations – including, recently, Google and Facebook – as well as conservative organizations, to draft legislation designed to benefit big business no matter the cost to the rest of us.
In an introduction to its so-called “agriculture principles,” ALEC announced, “The proper role of government involvement in agriculture is to limit and remove barriers for agricultural production, trade and consumption throughout our innovative food system.” Safety restrictions should “incorporate a least restrictive approach,” it says, while at the same time ALEC encourages high tech, high yield farming and calls out against “unnecessary additional restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture.”
ALEC boasts abut the safety and quality of our food system – the highest in the world, it says – but at the same time designs and pushes legislation designed to prosecute and crush journalists, whistleblowers and animal rights activists who would secretly infiltrate the food industry to expose shoddy practices and unsafe, unsanitary conditions that threaten the nation’s well-being. These so-called “ag-gag” bills criminalize those who would report abuse. If such laws had existed a century ago, a muckraker like Upton Sinclair would never have been allowed to report the sordid practices of the meat packing industry that led to his book “The Jungle” and saved who knows how many from tainted food, sickness and death?
Add to this the controversy over growth-enhancing drugs and hormones, the danger of genetically modified foods, the cruelty of big business factory farms: how can measures like these sound like good ideas to anyone other than those who would put profits above public health? It’s called “runaway capitalism,” and the time has come to stop this free market fundamentalism gone amok.
It’s enough to make you sick.
Karen Kimball contributed research to this piece.
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com.
Next time you tuck into a Red Lobster "Endless Shrimp" special or score some $7-per-pound salmon at a supermarket, consider this: You're very likely eating imported seafood raised on a factory-style farm in Asia—and it almost certainly was never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration on its way into the country and onto your plate.
Is that...safe? Big retailers like Walmart and restaurant chains like Darden (owner of Red Lobster) say yes, in part because some of the seafood they buy bears the Best Aquaculture Practices label.
Who issues that label? The Global Aquaculture Alliance, an industry endeavor—its board consists of representatives from (you guessed it) Darden, as well as Cargill, the Chilean salmon industry, and a large farmed-shrimp importer called Eastern Fish Company. Not surprisingly, BAP standards for farmed fish placed near the bottom (16 of 20) in a 2012 ranking of aquaculture labels by the University of Victoria's Seafood Ecology Research Group. (Darden says it independently tests its shrimp for contaminants but declined to share its results; Walmart did not answer our questions about inspections.)
But the responsibility for ensuring the safety of our food doesn't fall to retailers and restaurants alone.
The oversight authority belongs to the FDA, and the task is massive. In 2011, Americans consumed 4.7 billion pounds of seafood, 91 percent of which was imported. And yet the FDA only inspects a tiny amount of this giant haul: 2 percent at most. (The equivalent agency in Canada inspects 15 percent of imported seafood; in the European Union the figure is 50 percent.)
That's worrisome because imported seafood has a spotty track record. According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 44 percent of the 39 foodborne-illness outbreaks caused by imports from 2005 to 2010 involved seafood—more than any other type of food.
And then there's the drug problem. Like US meat farms, Asia's shrimp operations rely heavily on antibiotics to control diseases among creatures packed tightly together, and also to make them grow faster. That creates the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the final product. In a 2012 study, FDA scientists tested 330 samples of shrimp farmed in Thailand—the No. 1 US shrimp supplier—and bought in Little Rock, Arkansas, supermarkets. Sixty-seven turned up positive for strains of the bacteria klebsiella that are resistant to a range of antibiotics—32 of them showed resistance to no fewer than eight different antibiotics. The researchers concluded that "imported shrimp is a reservoir for multidrug-resistant Klebsiella," which can trigger urinary-tract infections and pneumonia.
And it's not just nasty bugs that can end up in our seafood. Testifying before Congress in 2008, Don Kraemer, then-deputy director of the FDA's Office of Food Safety, warned of "clear scientific evidence" that drug residues make it into the fish we eat. In 2011, the FDA tested just 0.1 percent of imported seafood products for drug traces. In 2008, the agency tested only 34 shrimp samples for residues of nitrofurans—a class of antibiotics banned because they're carcinogenic. Six samples tested positive.
The FDA does inspect processing facilities in exporting countries, the most prolific of which are China, Thailand, Canada, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Ecuador. But here, too, the program is lax.
According to a scathing 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office, the agency had inspected just 1.5 percent of seafood processing facilities in the previous six years in China, the source of nearly a quarter of US seafood imports. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation discovered that some US-bound shrimp are stored in heaps of ice made from water teeming with bacteria. And tilapia in a growing number of China's fish farms literally feed on pig manure—even though it contains salmonella and makes the fish vulnerable to disease.
In an October letter to the FDA, the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade group for the US wild-caught shrimp industry, identified three Vietnamese shrimp processors that were ordered to put their products through mandatory testing in Canada after authorities there found traces of fluoroquinolones, a banned antibiotic. Yet all three can still export freely to the United States.
Another major Vietnamese shrimp supplier to the US, Soc Trang Seafood Joint Stock Company (which, incidentally, is BAP-certified), had three different shipments turned back by Japan in 2012 due to the presence of banned chemicals—but the United States routinely welcomed its products.
Since I don't have much faith in either the industry's self-certifying effort or the FDA's porous testing program, I've taken to eating shrimp only as an occasional treat. When I do indulge, I pay up for the wild-caught kind. But it shouldn't be left to each of us to protect ourselves. Just as the government inspects Red Lobster's kitchens, so too should the FDA scrutinize the suppliers that keep them stocked with endless shrimp.
