Branding

If it’s any comfort, while infants tend to develop kidney stones and are susceptible to kidney failure after ingesting melamine-tainted milk, adults need to imbibe 10 kilos of tainted milk a day to develop kidney stones.

This is according to Chinese authorities, who are quoting scientific experts.

But no one is taking chances these days. So people I know who had been enjoying the rich taste of China-made Mon milk, sold in some major supermarket chains, have switched to… uhm… rice washing?

This is the disaster brought upon the planet by tainted milk from the world’s third largest market. A number of the world’s largest and most reputable food producers used milk from China, and now consumers are no longer sure which brands are safe.

Even New Zealand’s Fonterra, a venerable name in the international dairy industry, has been tarred by its partnership with the Chinese. This must be particularly painful for the Kiwis, who have possibly the world’s most stringent product quality control standards and enforcement, and who have painstakingly built the New Zealand brand into one synonymous with guaranteed consumer safety, satisfaction and world-class excellence.

That enviable type of branding is something every country must aspire for. One of the best indicators of a country’s progress is global consumer confidence in its brand.

France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, the UK and the United States have achieved this type of branding.

Today, as the People's Republic of China marks its 59th year, and 2008 marks the 30th year of the nation’s efforts toward reform and opening up, developing a reliable world-class brand should be one of its key goals.

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Right now the China brand is in tatters, thanks to unscrupulous manufacturers. After lead in toys, toxic substances in toothpaste, cardboard in dimsum, formalin and then melamine in White Rabbit candy, melamine in pet food, and now melamine in milk, what next?

A Chinese official told me that dairy cow breeders in his country were starting to slaughter their animals for beef because demand even for milk fresh from the farm had plummeted so much and it was no longer cost-efficient to continue feeding dairy cows.

Chinese people were losing their livelihoods, the official said, so why don’t we focus on positive news, such as the first spacewalk by a Chinese?

The world did applaud the spacewalk, but quickly shifted its focus back to melamine-tainted milk, which is a new phenomenon. China, after all, is a far third in the space race after the US and Russia, and there simply isn’t enough excitement after the first time. It’s somewhat like Filipinos scaling Mt. Everest for the first time — after everyone else has been there, done that.

Yesterday’s report from Beijing was that 27 people had been arrested, bringing to 36 the number of people apprehended so far in connection with the scandal over milk tainted with the toxic industrial chemical melamine.

I asked a Chinese official if people arrested in connection with the melamine scare were already dead. The official’s quick reply: Yes.

Maybe it was a wish, or a tongue-in-cheek reply. Maybe the official misunderstood the question.

Or maybe the answer was true. Chinese officials emphasize that they are taking this latest blow — the worst so far, it seems — to their products seriously.

China’s ambassador to Manila, Song Tao, said his government is dealing with the problem in a “serious, conscientious, open” manner, in the spirit of “being responsible” to all people.

Sanlu Group, one of the three major Chinese milk producers at the heart of the scandal, has declared bankruptcy. Another company, Yili, a sponsor of the Beijing Olympics, may survive this tsunami because, an official explained, its top executives were unaware of the use of melamine to boost the protein content of the company’s products for nutrition analysis. This was not the case at Sanlu, where everyone all the way to the top corporate echelons was reportedly aware of the practice.

A report yesterday said underground plants producing melamine that was sold to cattle breeding farms and milk purchasing stations had been found in northern China’s Hebei province, where Sanlu is based.

One positive aspect here is that most of the details of the widening scandal are emanating from state-controlled Chinese media. This is in keeping with the Chinese effort to implement reforms and open up to the world.

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At the Chinese National Day reception in Manila the other night, Ambassador Song Tao noted with warranted pride that in the past 30 years, “the industrious and enterprising Chinese people have succeeded in making the historic transformation of China from a highly centralized and planned economy to a vibrant socialist market economy, and from a closed and semi-closed society to one that is fully open today to the outside world.”

Poverty in his country, he noted, had dropped from 250 million to 10 million.

His speech was punctuated with at least 10 references to China’s commitment to peace: world peace, peaceful reunification with Taiwan, peaceful “use of outer space,” sustainable peaceful development. China has often emphasized that the world should not be threatened by its “peaceful rise.”

“The experience of the past three decades tells us that China cannot develop in isolation from the rest of the world, nor can the world make real progress without China,” the ambassador said.

The process will be hastened and made smoother with a reliable China brand.