China foods are not safe?
BEIJING
The head of China’s product quality watchdog resigned Monday because of the tainted baby formula scandal that has sickened nearly 53,000 infants, highlighting a breakdown in the country’s food safety system only a year after a major overhaul.
ADVERTISEMENT The official Xinhua News Agency said Li Changjiang stepped down with the approval of China’s Cabinet. Li’s agency is responsible for ensuring that China’s food supply chain is safe. His resignation comes after the industrial chemical melamine was blamed for causing kidney stones and kidney failure in babies. The chemical was found in infant formula and other milk products from 22 of China’s dairy companies. Xinhua said Wang Yong had replaced Li as the director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
Although Xinhua said only that Li had resigned after infants had become sick after taking tainted milk products, the widespread nature of the crisis reflects a systemic breakdown in supervision of the dairy industry.
It was only a year ago that China’s product safety system was overhauled with new regulations and procedures to try to restore consumer confidence and preserve export markets after a string of recalls and warnings abroad over tainted toothpaste, faulty tires and other goods. In an indication of Beijing’s determination to improve product safety, the government executed the disgraced chief of China’s food and drug agency, who was convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for letting fake medicine into the domestic market. The latest crisis indicated that problems were still slipping through the cracks, however.
The crisis comes just one month after the Beijing Olympics, which the government wanted to use, in part, to prove to the world that China was capable of setting a new standard for food safety. The discovery of the tainted milk is especially damaging because Sanlu Group Co., the company at the heart of the scandal, is China’s biggest producer of powdered milk and such large companies are expected to act as industry role models for safety and quality. Infant formula and other milk products have been pulled from stores around the country and Chinese imports from liquid milk to instant coffee mix to milk-based candy have been banned around Asia.
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