Extract from an email I received this week:
This is the report … on my visit to China last year: “Highlights from the local newspapers were on food safety issues and we should be thankful that we have legislation in place as what is happening over there is frightening. eg: exploding watermelons still haunt a farmer after an effort to chemically boost his fruit crop went spectacularly wrong when he mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron a growth accelerator. The incident has become a focus of a Chinese media drive to expose the lax farming practices shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of food safety scandals. It follows discoveries of toxic melamine in milk arsenic in soy sauce bleach in mushrooms and the detergent borax in pork added to make it resemble beef. In the past week the People’s Daily website has run stories of human birth control chemicals being used on cucumber plants in Xian. China Daily has reported Sichuan peppers releasing red dye in water and the Sina news portal revealed that barite powder had been injected into chickens in Guizhou to increase their weight. More alarming still was a study by researchers at Nanjing Agricultural University that estimated a tenth of China’s rice may be tainted with cadmium a heavy metal that can affect the nervous system. Many wary consumers choose to buy foreign products which are seen as safer but this is also vulnerable to mislabelling. The Fruit Industry Association of Guangdong province told reporters this week that “most ‘imported’ fruit are grown in China.”
Agribusiness in Australia tells us we don’t have a food security challenge: We produce enough food to export and export our clean food overseas then import the food Australians eat from China as often as not. New Zealand is also losing its clean food name by acting as a ‘image-laundry’ for Chinese-produced food to come through.
Becomes more and more important to grow our own.