Pet food poisoning scare puts China's agro-exports under scrutiny

American food safety regulators trying to figure out how an industrial chemical called melamine contaminated so much pet food in the United States might go to the heavily polluted city of Zhangqiu, Shandong Province, in the northern part of the country. There at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, small acorn-sized chunks of white rock, is then being sold to local entrepreneurs, who say they secretly mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to artificially enhance the protein level. It has been dubbed "fake protein" and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that provides higher nutrition value.
"It just saves money," says a manager at an animal feed factory here. "Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level."

The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here. But now melamine is at the center of a massive, multinational pet food recall after it was linked earlier this month to the deaths and injuries of thousands of cats and dogs in the United States and South Africa.

No one knows exactly how melamine - which had not been believed to be particularly toxic - became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal. U.S. regulators are now headed to China to figure out why pet food ingredients imported from there, including wheat gluten, were contaminated with high levels of the chemical. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has banned imports of wheat gluten from China and ordered the recall of over 60 million packages of pet food. And the agency has opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also stepped in, ordering more than 6,000 pigs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to pig farms in eight states. Scientists are now trying to determine whether melamine could be harmful to human health. The huge pet food recall is raising questions in the United States about regulatory controls at a time when food supplies are increasingly being sourced globally.

The pet food case is also putting China's agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country's dubious food safety record and history of excessive antibiotic and pesticide use. In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair, to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

China's government disputes any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But Friday, regulators here banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies. Yet it is clear from visiting this region of northern China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Melamine is the new scam of choice, they say, because urea - another nitrogen-rich chemical that works similarly - is illegal for use in pig and poultry feed and can be easily tested for in China as well as the United States.

IHT