EDITORIAL - Lessons in food safety

Babies have died or fallen ill, and mothers are unsure which milk products are safe. Some of the world’s most reputable names in the food industry have seen their products taken off store shelves and their earnings plunge. The damage to their brands could linger until Christmas, a peak shopping season. A Philippine distributor of imported chocolates said the company has lost P30 million in just two weeks. Even manufacturers of noodles whose packaging is marked with Chinese characters have found it necessary to clarify to the public that their products are made in the Philippines from safe ingredients.

These are just some of the consequences of the discovery that melamine, an industrial chemical that is normally used for making plastics, had been added to milk produced by three of China’s top milk companies. Melamine, marketed as protein powder in some cases, boosts a product’s protein content for purposes of nutrition analysis. As the scandal has shown, it leads to the formation of kidney stones, with infants most susceptible to the affliction.

The milk scandal comes on the heels of the discovery in the United States last year that pet food made in China had been laced with melamine. The tainted food was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats. Later, another scandal erupted, this time involving the use of formaldehyde as a preservative in the popular White Rabbit candy. Recently, White Rabbit candies sold outside China tested positive for melamine.

After toxic paint in toys, contaminated toothpaste and pet food, and now formalin and melamine in milk and other food products, it will take time and a lot of reassurance from Chinese authorities before global consumer confidence in China-made products is restored.

This scandal should give Beijing a greater sense of urgency in improving its enforcement of food and other product safety standards if the country wants to maintain its status as one of the world’s largest exporters. Regulatory agencies especially those involving food and animal feed must be strengthened. And as the latest scandal has once again shown, the lack of transparency — whether in the spread of a new disease such as SARS or the discovery of melamine contamination in milk — tends to boomerang in the Information Age.