Here's Wednesday's editorial urging tough action to persuade China to crack down on unsafe food exports.

U.S. must lean on China
to boost food safety

Lax rules and cheap production costs have allowed China to corner global market on many food additives – without a strict safety sytem in place

What is it going to take to get China to understand that it can’t trade widely in food products if it won’t enforce food-safety standards at home?
It will take more than a diplomatic scolding, for sure.
Top U.S. trade officials reportedly told Chinese counterparts visiting Washington, D.C. Tuesday that China needs better safety control for exported food and ingredients.
But mere finger-wagging won’t make China clean up its act. Unless China quickly demonstrates progress on this front, tougher action will be essential.
China has become such huge player in food exports – especially in certain chemical ingredients widely used in food processing – that its lack of a rigorous inspection and control system can no longer be ignored.
China’s glaring deficiencies in this regard were spotlighted when the deaths of American cats and dogs were traced to Chinese-made pet food contaminated with melamine, a chemical used to make plastic. The same additive has since been found in feed for U.S. hogs, fish and chickens.
Chinese authorities quickly shut down two plants blamed for the pet-food contamination but cleaned them up before U.S. inspectors arrived to investigate.
The latest outrage involves Chinese toothpaste found to contain a potentially deadly chemical blamed for the deaths of at least 51 people in Panama, where the ingredient was mixed into cough syrup.
It’s one thing if China’s rulers don’t care about protecting the safety of food the Chinese eat. But shipping $2.2 billion in agricultural products to the U.S. each year without a modern food-safety program is completely unacceptable.
Many trade experts say it will be hard to get China to improve much because American companies are so dependent on ingredients from China, including vitamins, food flavorings and preservatives. For example, China controls 80 percent of the global supply of ascorbic acid, a useful preservative widely used in processed foods and other food preparation.
In a prime example of dysfunction in globalized trade, China’s lax environmental regulations, cheap energy and lower wages have shifted the production of commodity ingredients away from the U.S. and Europe, which have strong safety systems. The Chinese government has issued quality standards for only 250 of 1,750 government-approved food additives.
The problem is compounded because many small Chinese additive makers classify their products as nonfood items to evade scrutiny both in China and abroad.
Two American food companies, Mission Foods Corp. and Tyson Foods Inc., quietly informed suppliers recently that they want no ingredients from China. That may be the only kind of pressure Chinese leaders will understand.
China is anxious to begin exporting chickens to the U.S. American beef producers want to enter the Chinese market. Supposedly a deal is in the works. Unless and until China gets serious about food safety, no deals like that should be remotely possible.