Tons Of Melamine Contaminated Chinese Milk Products Are Still On The Market.

Subject:	Tons Of Melamine Contaminated Chinese Milk Products Are Still On The Market.
Date:	08 Feb 2010 21:29:27 GMT

China finds 170 more tons of tainted milk powder that should
have been destroyed by was reused
By Cara Anna, The Associated Press

BEIJING - The discovery has punched a 170-ton hole in
China's promises to overhaul its food safety system.
Officials say they've found yet another case where large
amounts of tainted milk powder from the country's 2008
scandal that should have been destroyed were instead
repackaged.

China ordered tens of thousands of milk products laced with
an industrial chemical burned or buried after more than
300,000 children were sickened and at least six died from
the contamination.

But, crucially, the government did not carry out the
eradication itself, and this month an emergency crackdown
has made it clear that tons of compromised products are
still on the market.

Tainted dairy has recently been found in China's largest
city, Shanghai, and in the provinces of Shaanxi, Shandong,
Liaoning, Guizhou, Jilin and Hebei. At least five companies
are suspected of reselling tainted products that should have
been destroyed, the Health Ministry said last week. The
problem products uncovered in the 10-day emergency crackdown
have so far been limited to the domestic market.

The campaign is set to end Wednesday, and it's not clear
whether it will be extended. The country's biggest holiday,
the Lunar New Year, starts this weekend, and already some
offices are closing and millions of people are going on
vacation.

The Health Ministry has not commented since the crackdown
began, and the China Dairy Association has remained quiet as
well.

"The problem is, this is a product with a shelf life of
several years. It's very important that the product is not
left unattended," said Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO senior
scientist on food safety based in Beijing. "There's always a
risk it will find a way back into the system."

The latest discovery underscores the difficulties of
policing China's smaller food producers, despite a sweeping
new food safety law that took effect last summer and
promised stricter quality controls after the 2008 scandal,
which was China's worst food safety crisis in years.

In the wake of that crisis, China punished dozens of
officials, dairy executives and farmers, even executing a
dairy farmer and a milk salesman. But the government didn't
destroy seized products itself. Instead, it issued
guidelines on how to destroy them, suggesting they be burned
in large-capacity incinerators or that small amounts be
buried in landfills.

In the southern city of Guangzhou, however, the local
government did take over disposal after one garbage company
poured tainted milk into a city river.

China's new food safety law places even more responsibility
on food producers to ensure their products are safe,
including introducing tough new penalties for makers of
unsafe products.

On Monday, with the announcement that more products
contaminated by the industrial chemical melmine had been
found, it appeared the new regulations had failed again.
Officials issued a recall for more than 170 tons of milk
powder tainted by the industrial chemical melamine and
closed two dairy companies in the northern region of
Ningxia, the China Daily newspaper reported.

The report said officials have already seized 72 tons of the
powder but were still looking for the rest, which had been
sold by the Ningxia Tiantian Dairy Co. Ltd. to five
factories in the neighbouring region of Inner Mongolia and
the bustling southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian.

The report said the tainted powder should have been
destroyed in the 2008 scandal, but that an unnamed company
gave it to Ningxia Tiantian as a debt payment.

Zhao Shuming, secretary-general of the Ningxia Dairy
Industry Association, told the China Daily that said Ningxia
Tiantian appears to have been unaware the product contained
melamine but should have known that the repackaging itself,
which usually involves changing production and sell-by
dates, was illegal.

Zhao told the paper that many small dairies, including
Ningxia Tiantian, don't have the technology to even test for
melamine. When watered-down milk is laced with the chemical,
it appears to still be rich in protein in quality tests that
measure nitrogen, found in both the melamine and protein.

"Flaws in the previous system led to the current chaos. What
if companies with tainted milk also hold back their stocks
for this round of checkups and reuse them later, just like
what's happening now?" the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Zhao spoke more carefully Monday, telling the AP, "We have
strict checks, and our client companies have strict checks,
too."

Ningxia Tiantian has been shut down, and a second company,
Ningxia Panda Dairy Co. Ltd., was also ordered closed
because of ties to a Shanghai dairy found with tainted goods
last year, the report said.

Online Chinese chat rooms were buzzing Monday over the
latest tainted milk finding, with many asking "Why are these
things happening again?"

But a large-scale drop in consumer confidence that happened
in the 2008 scandal isn't likely this time, said Cindy Yang,
a dairy analyst for the Netherlands-based Rabobank Group in
Shanghai.

"These companies are quite small ones," she said Monday,
adding that China's largest dairies put stricter safety
measures in place after feeling the bite of bad publicity -
and raised prices 20 to 30 per cent to pay for the better
quality.

"You can't say that because of these cases, there's no trust
in the whole market," she said.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100208/world/as_china_tainted_milk
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