Jackson Free Press

It seems that all that "free trade"—and loss of American jobs and trading economic strength in our communities for sweat shops—is starting to come home to roost by killing our pets. As the JFP has been saying for years, folks: Think Global, Shop Local. And that doesn't mean chasing our manufacturers to other countries, Barbour, Clinton, et al. What goes around does indeed come around.

American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein. Workers at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Company say they commonly add the chemical melamine in the process of making animal feed. Melamine appears as protein but has no nutritional value.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."

Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.

Previous Commentsshow

China's like that. Corrupt to the extreme.

Ironghost

Apr 30 2007

When I heard about the tainted per food being eaten by hogs, I was so thankful that I stopped eating pork 15 years ago.

LatashaWillis

Apr 30 2007

Wouldn't a more efficient response be simply to hold importers of food products to the same health and sanitation standards as domestic producers, and then actually enforce those rules? To the extent foreign producers are less transparent or unwilling to submit to regulation, we can, under GATT, exclude them altogether. Oh, and what's so "progressive" about laws that prohibit really poor people in really poor countries from improving their standard of living by selling things to comparatively wealthy Americans? If you'd like working class Americans to enjoy a great income and great benefits for working 35 hours a week at a leisurely, semi-skilled union job, put down that $6 cup of coffee and pony up the dough for a domestic wealth transfer. But don't put the screws to Chinese peasants. Seriously, though, the world only needs so much labor, and the demand will only decrease with automation, improved infrastructure, etc. Human civilization is built on the fundamental assumption that just about everyone can survive by selling their labor -- i.e., demand, even for less-skilled labor, will almost always outpace supply. But this will not always be the case. Over the next century, as automation and economies of scale render all but the most skilled humans economically superfluous, we'll have to make some tough decisions about the ways in which we allocate wealth. Pretending that nothing has changed --and that it's still 1955, and Ford and GM are still putting a chicken in every pot-- strikes me as a particularly bad way to approach the problem.

laughter

Apr 30 2007

A lot of people are going to demand that 'their' pet food manufacturers use ingredients from the US and Canada. I know I don't want my dogs eating food with ingredients from China. I'm also thinking twice about eating "mock duck" (gluten based meat substitute) from China. I don't believe I will be buying more of that.

Michele

May 1 2007

Poison toothpaste

LatashaWillis

May 19 2007