Beware of made-in-China foods: rats sold as mutton

Malaysia’s election results were being tallied as this column went to press yesterday. Malaysian and foreign reporters acknowledged it was too close to call. The 46-year ruling party of Prime Minister Najib Razak would be left either debilitated or facing its first-ever handover of power.

If opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim wins the majority, Manila and the rest of ASEAN can expect warmer ties with Kuala Lumpur. The more than 15,000 Filipino victims of pyramiding scammer Manuel Amalilio will have greater chances to retrieve him and what’s left of his P12-billion loot from Sabah.

Amalilio, a Philippine passport holder, is related to Sabah’s chief minister, the federal foreign minister and the attorney general, all Najib allies. Thus, they kept him in Sabah under contrived criminal charges. Anwar exposed this, and Malaysia’s small, uncontrolled press saw a plot by Najib to use Amalilio’s hoard to steal the election. For this, Najib strived to link Anwar and other oppositionists to the ensuing incursion into Sabah of a ragtag band of the Sultan of Sulu.

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Philippine Airlines president Ramon S. Ang exuded confidence as usual in announcing last week 12 new destinations. Six are in the tough Middle East, where national airlines receive fuel subsidies: Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam. Fuel makes up 40 percent of any flight’s cost, so PAL’s Middle Eastern competitors have an edge when departing for Manila loaded with price-discounted gas. Ang aims to overcome that with personnel and service cost efficiencies, to regain the brand loyalty of two million Filipino workers in the region.

Same strategy of cost efficiencies in new flights to Brisbane and Perth, Australia, with Darwin as jump-off for both, Ang told business writers. Also for Kuala Lumpur. As for Guangzhou, the China passenger volume is simply too huge for any airline to dominate the Manila route. The 12th new destination is actually a return to Basco, Batanes, due to renewed public demand.

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Nobody starves in China these days, a Time magazine columnist recently wrote. But if the bellies of 1.3 billion Chinese are being filled, it’s with the filthiest, riskiest foods. Such meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, and ingredients are being exported and gobbled up in the rest of the world, including bargain-conscious Philippines.

The columnist lamented how tough it is to nourish growing sons in Beijing, what with reports of unsanitary food handling. Spotted last March were 16,000 dead diseased pigs floating down a major river that supplies water to Shanghai. Soon followed a thousand dead ducks bobbing in another river. Uninspected, uncertified fetid seafood, orange-dyed citruses, and toxic-fertilized Shandong apples openly are sold in markets and street corners. It’s unknown how many have been sickened by the unsafe chow. Invariably capping the scary news items are absurd assurances from Chinese authorities that everything’s under control. Clearly they have not learned hard lessons from their criminal silence on the SARS epidemic a decade ago.

Because of price and volume, multinational food traders and processors turn to Chinese suppliers. The dirty foods find their way to every corner of the world, afflicting untold numbers of unwary eaters. Millions of fowls potentially infected with the new H7N9 bird flu strain are being exported to ASEAN countries. Ten persons already have died in China of the unsolved disease; two were poultry workers; a Taiwanese also died after visiting a chicken farm in China.

Bird flu is just the tip of the pile of filthy Chinese meals. Last Oct. 11,000 children in 500 schools and daycares in Germany were downed by diarrhea and vomiting. The norovirus that hit them — 30 were hospitalized — was traced to a shipment of frozen strawberries from Shandong. Der Spiegel reported that over-fertilized vegetables, and fish fed feces of geese and pigs also have penetrated other European marts. Alarm spread recently in Vietnam because Chinese fruit imports overly were laced with deadly preservatives and pesticides.

The problem is traced to spotty food and drug regulation by the Chinese government. There are also the patently unscrupulous. In 2008 the whole world went on alert due to deadly levels of melamine illegally added to increase the apparent protein content of pet foods and infant formula made in China. About 300,000 infants were sickened and six died in China alone. The head of the country’s food and drug agency was found to have taken bribes to ignore safety standards. Too often has it been reported that Chinese farmers do not eat their own harvests.

The Philippines is an avid buyer of fresh, frozen, preserved, and processed foods and ingredients from China -- all likely dirty or infected. Fruits, veggie chips, milk tea, and instant drinks enter the ports by the hundreds of container vans. If not legally imported, the Chinese produce is smuggled in, to the detriment not only of consumers but also farmers, fishermen, feeds and fertilizer makers, and traders. A big headache is the traffic of shiploads of garlic, onions, cabbages, lettuce, okra, and the like. Eerily the stocks come in exactly the same size, shape, and shade, raising suspicions not just of unhealthy genetic modification but more of coloring and preserving with formaldehyde. China produces 80 percent of the world’s garlic, and most of its honey.

Filipino consumers need to be warned about food imports from China: insect-infested potatoes, antibiotic-laced shrimp, oyster sauce containing staphylococcus, pasta with maggots, and glass shards among pumpkin seeds. In 2007 the health department alerted against consuming Chinese packaged foods without the seal of the Bureau of Food and Drugs. The agency had withheld clearances from made-in-China noodles, snacks, and food additives contaminated with toxic substances, illegal dyes, and industrial wax. New alarms need to be raised. In recent days rat flesh was found being sold in Chinese cities as rabbit meat; similarly passed on as mutton were wild fox and mink. Diseased pork and beef also were being doused with gelatins, toxins, and banned dyes. Not to forget, the intruding Chinese vessel that ran aground in the Tubbataha Reefs was laden with decaying meat of 3,200 Palawan anteaters, an aphrodisiac in Chinese lore. Many of the shark, turtles, giant clams, and squid frequently confiscated from Chinese marine poachers are stored in grimy crates.

This is not to say that the Philippines does not have its share of homegrown food adulterers. In a mountain town in Bohol in 2005, thirty schoolchildren died from eating fried sweet potatoes that the careless street vendor accidentally had powdered not with flour but insecticide. Last Christmas two makeshift food processors were raided on reports of unsanitary surroundings. But the fact is that the Filipino authorities were on the ball — unlike in China where officials seem to not care.

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