Catfish Blues

Another Salvo in the Moderate-Intensity US-China Trade War

Planning to eat 100 tons of Chinese catfish? Relax. The FDA's got your back.

The FDA import alert targeting Chinese catfish, eel, basa, dace, and shrimp contaminated with antibiotics and anti-microbial agents revived recollections of the Chinese aquaculture industry.

Based on my past experience, the FDA’s prime directive vis a vis Chinese aquatic imports has traditionally involved preventing American consumers from becoming violently, acutely ill by products that had been improperly handled or stored after harvesting.

I remember a grizzled veteran of the shrimp trade telling me that unscrupulous importers faced with the rejection of a load of nasty frozen shrimp by the FDA could divert the rejected container to Mexico, thaw the product, wash it with chlorine to lower the bacteria count, refreeze it, and import it as Mexican product.

Yum! as Rachel Ray would say.

The current to-do about Chinese aquatic products has to do with an entirely opposite issue: China’s use of drugs as feed additives to prevent the spread of disease among live creatures in the ponds--and the long term risk of prolonged exposure to these drugs for U.S. consumers.

Farm-raised fish and shrimp are a huge business in China and throughout Asia. In China, enclosing coastal areas and creating fish ponds is seen as a way to utilize marginal coastal lands and improve farmers’ incomes through production of high-value, exportable crop. Chinese governments, corporations, and the World Bank have pitched in to create the necessary, expensive infrastructure of ponds and processing plant.

The downside of farm-raised aquatic products is that density=profits.

Which means you have a gazillion shrimp or carp swimming around inside an enclosed pond that is basically a gigantic fish toilet. To add to the biological load, you dump feed into this stew and hope that the critters eat (most of) it before it sinks to the bottom.

All sorts of bacterial, fungal, and algal yuck breeds in the ponds, can spread like wildfire through the population, and can even contaminate the mud at the bottom so thoroughly that the pond has to be drained, limed, and left to rest for a couple seasons until it is usable again.

Just as in the poultry industry, dosing the feed with antibiotics is a way to keep a pond full of sellable product, instead of thousands of pounds of dead, dying, or sick fish with fungus on their lips and gills or with holes eaten their heads by rampant bacterial infections.

In the United States, the FDA bans a certain class of antibiotics—fluoroqinolones—because widespread use quickly results in the emergence of nasty, resistant strains of bacteria.

If fluoroquinolones ring a bell it’s because one of the varieties—one used as a veterinary product, as a matter of fact—is ciprofloxacin a.k.a. Cipro a.k.a. the anthrax-killer that Americans hysterically stockpiled in the aftermath of 9/11.

Three states—Mississippi, Alabama, and Lousiana—banned Chinese catfish when it tested positive for fluorquinolones. An Alabama congressman, Artur Davis, made it a national issue, Chuck Schumer pontificates, and bingo there’s an FDA import alert, not just against certain importers but the whole country.

Even though the director of the Mississippi Poison Control Center stated (h/t to Left in Alabama) that you’d have to eat 220,000 pounds of Chinese catfish before getting sick...

...and the potential advantages of ingesting huge quantities of Cipro-laced Chinese catfish as an anthrax prophylactic have been inexplicably unaddressed.

Well, maybe not so inexplicably.

Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana may not be at the forefront of food safety, but they are the leading producers of farm-raised catfish and shrimp, the very products threatened by Chinese imports.

The Mississippi Delta, home of the blues, is also heart of the U.S. catfish industry. Big farms in places like Tupelo—Elvis’s home town--and the euphoniously-named Belzoni produce catfish, votes, and political clout.

This clout was displayed in 2005, when the same three states sounded the fluoroquinolone alarm against Vietnam, and Vietnam banned use of the antibiotic in response (the Mises Institute provides the protectionist backstory and waxes indignant here).

This year, I guess because it’s China, the FDA decided to pile on, dinging China for traces of carcinogenic anti-microbial e.g. anti-fungus agents malachite green, gentian violet, and nitrofuran in its aquaculture exports as well as fluoroquinolones.

You have to wonder how bad gentian violet can be, considering it’s used on tampons and to treat thrush in infants.

China’s injection of trace quantities of fluoroquinolones and carcinogenic anti-microbials in a limited sector of the U.S. food supply certainly isn’t an acute health risk.

As the FDA itself said ,

The products "could cause serious health problems if consumed over a long period of time," said [FDA Assistant Commissioner for Food Protection David Acheson].

Still, Acheson added, the low levels of contaminants means that there is "no imminent threat" to the public health.

And from the LA Times :

FDA officials, however, said the small quantities of the banned chemicals found in testing were not enough to pose an immediate threat to human health.

"We are not asking for this product to be withdrawn from the market or for people to take it out of their freezer and throw it away," said Margaret Glavin, head of the FDA's enforcement branch. "This is a long-term health concern … not an acute concern."

You get the feeling there’s a lot of things in the U.S. food supply that’s going to kill us a lot quicker than Chinese dace, basa, eels, shrimp, and catfish.

And that the FDA, by issuing an import alert against the entire country of the PRC, is making some kind of political statement instead of a public health move.

After fluoroquinolones were detected in Vietnamese catfish in 2005, the FDA response was kinda different:

Under FDA regulations, when an outlawed chemical is found in a product imported into the US, the importer is placed on a black list, and five more shipments from that importer would be tested before the import ban would be lifted.

Nevertheless, it’s not a bad idea to bring the Chinese feed and food industry in line with higher U.S. standards, so it’s easy to forgive the FDA for a piece of enforcement that’s a teeny bit politically motivated and selective.

In a heartening example of positive blowback, the Chinese central government is apparently responding to Western investigative reporting by making food safety a focus , and try to make the case for the CCP as steward of the Chinese peoples’ well-being and not just the reckless enabler of a grab the buck and damn the rules post socialist oligarchy.

Despite these potentially laudable outcomes, regulatory activities on the international stage that are skewed by politics and protectionism bring a certain set of problems with them.

Selective enforcement begets selective enforcement, or tit begets tat.

Torn from the headlines :

BEIJING - China said Saturday it had rejected a shipment of pistachios from the United States because it contained ants, the latest indication the government may be retaliating as Chinese products are turned back from overseas because of safety concerns.

The state television report, which showed inspectors wearing face masks and sealing the shipping container that held the pistachios, indicated an increasing push to show that other countries also have food safety issues. On Friday, Chinese food safety watchdog announced that shipments of health supplements and raisins from the U.S. had been returned or destroyed because they did not meet quality control standards.

If we want to turn food and product quality into an anti-China club, China has signaled it’s going to hit back.

Obliquely harassing China through a campaign of trade-related enforcement actions may seems to be a good match for the tactical impotence of the Bush administration and the passive-aggressive tendencies of the Democrats in negotiating with China.

However, the same unilateralism, tactical expediency, and political opportunism that make these enforcement actions cheap and easy to apply also signal the dearth of political will and international consensus backing them...

...and will encourage the targeted party to escalate instead of compromise if it believes it holds the stronger hand.

Time will tell if the Bush administration's targeted application of anti-dumping, anti-subsidy, and inspection measures against China will yield anything more than rancor and stalemate.

In our moderate-intensity trade war with China, the benefits to the United States, its businesses, and its consumers may be nugatory.

Perhaps the Chinese consumer protection movement will emerge as the real victor instead.

Environmental Cat--astrophe

Does the trail of tainted pet food lead to a fertilizer plant in Shandong?

America is much abubble concerning a mysterious string of pet deaths and illnesses.

Dogs and cats have been keeling over with kidney failure, apparently caused by pet food.

The smoking gun concerning the pet food connection may very well be the lone human casualty, a woman in Ottawa who bravely and almost fatally consumed her pet’s dog food in order to coax the recalcitrant mutt to eat its dinner.

As reported in the March 25 National Post, Woman sick after eating tainted pet food, by Melissa Arseniuk:

"I was trying to get her to eat," Ms. Larabie said, but Missy’s protest continued. Desperate, Ms. Larabie tried "just a little bite" of the Iams dog food to make the terrier think it was people food, then gave Missy the rest.

"I said, 'It’s not going to kill me to take a little bite' ... but I guess it could have," said Ms. Larabie...
...
The mealtime routine continued for about two weeks, until both dog and master became sick on March 17.

She—and her initially prudent but ultimately gullible dog—ended up under emergency medical care:

In this case, a canine and its master wound up in hospital — Missy at the Alta Vista Animal Hospital and Elaine Larabie at an after-hours emergency room.

"I thought I caught a virus, but then I realized I ate the food, and put two and two together," Ms. Larabie said.

For three days, she suffered a range of "confusing" and "embarrassing" symptoms, including loss of appetite, vomiting and foaming of the mouth. She also had problems urinating.

Pet food is being swept from the shelves in recalls, and there are dark suspicions of thousands of pet fatalities and millions of dollars in legal damages in the offing.

China comes into the picture because contaminated Chinese wheat gluten is the focus of US investigations.

The gluten’s exporter of record is one Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company.

It doesn’t produce wheat gluten but, in return for its investment in production of other vegetable-based protein powders, it apparently has trading rights to export wheat gluten and other feed additives.

Anying has discretely removed wheat gluten from its product list, but its offering survived on one of the innumerable Chinese on-line bulletin boards meant to facilitate business-to-business commerce (the magnificently named “Ubiquitous Value Network”; last I checked the server was down, but I had previously printed out Xuzhou’s solicitation to sell).

The spec is distinctive, a low quality material with wet-based protein > 64%, dry base > 66%...you get the picture.

Anyway, the only place I could find offering that identical spec was an outfit in north-central Shandong, called the Binzhou Rongchang Biologic Technology Development Corp 滨州荣昌生物科技有限公司 .

Binzhou is in a wheat-producing area crisscrossed by tributaries of the Yellow River, with two large flour mills.

Unlike Xuzhou, Rongchang bills itself as a producer (and not just exporter) of wheat gluten (谷朊粉to the trade).

Not a 100% lock but certainly a good possibility that the wheat gluten came from Binzhou.

Having come up with a defendable hypothesis for the source of the wheat gluten, China Matters will engage in risky speculation.

Fortunately, we are not alone. The pet food poisoning has been something of a puzzle for a lot of experts.

Labs have been picking over the wheat gluten but have been unable to identify an unambiguously toxic component.

A lab at Cornell originally declared on March 23 that it had detected aminopterin—identified as a rat poison--in the wheat gluten.

That sounded promising: wheat + rats + poison + sloppy housekeeping = contamination.

But it turns out that aminopterin is an anti-leukemia drug. Its identification as a rat poison in actual use is a canard, based on a reference from an American Cyanamid patent.

According to the ASPCA, the descriptions of distress they are hearing aren’t consistent with aminopterin.

Also, the FDA couldn’t find aminopterin in its wheat gluten samples.

What they did find was melamine—up to 6.6% contamination, with the crystals “clearly visible” . And there were reports that melamine crystals were found in the kidneys of some deceased pets.

Problem is, melamine isn’t considered to be particularly toxic.

So scientists are theorizing about how the nitrogen in melamine somehow got converted into some highly toxic derivative that smoked the victims’ kidneys.

Well, what interested me about the whole issue was my mis-spent youth, much of it spent in Chinese grain and chemical plants.

Wheat gluten and melamine really don’t go together.

For one thing, melamine is considerably more expensive than wheat gluten. No unscrupulous exporter is going to cut wheat gluten with melamine to increase his profits.

Second, wheat gluten is produced in wheat milling plants in China’s grain handling and processing network using an old and simple technique. Then the stuff is bagged and sold to food and feed processors.

Users rely on wheat gluten’s ability to absorb a great deal of water and become sticky to make their products—like pet food—all yummy-gummy instead of slurping out of the can in disgustingly distinct streams of fat, water, innards, cereals, and whatever else goes in there.

There’s an international demand for wheat gluten, it’s one of the more profitable outputs available to the traditionally impoverished grain processors in China, and so Chinese plants are pretty keen to make it.

Melamine is produced in a chemical plant—in China, usually in a urea fertilizer plant under the chemical industry bureaucracy—using a relatively sophisticated process. Some of it is used as a fire retardant or fertilizer; most of it is shipped to plastics plants, where it’s polymerized with formaldehyde and turned into products like disposable plastic cutlery.

I’m pretty sure that both these products—relatively valuable and meant to be free of contamination—are bagged on site where they are produced. It’s quite unlikely that they would be shipped in bulk by rail car or, even if they were, that wheat gluten would end up in a chemical bulk car and get contaminated.

So, finding melamine in your wheat gluten is like opening your box of corn flakes and finding a fistful of moonrocks inside. It could happen—apparently it did happen—but it doesn’t seem likely.

I do have a theory.

There is one common thread between wheat gluten and melamine:

Water.

Wheat gluten production uses a lot of water. After the wheat kernel is broken up in the dry mill, a water wash separates the insoluble wheat gluten from the soluble wheat starch. Then the globs of wheat gluten are screened off and go through a drying process. Any insolubles in the water could be concentrated in the gluten.

The melamine production process happens to produce a lot of melamine-laced effluent water.

Melamine has low solubility in water, biodegrades poorly, and tends to hang around in the environment.

For the purposes of my theory, it is highly advantageous that upriver of Binzhou is the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group, whose urea plant--one of China’s ancient, 1958 vintage demonstration plants-- also produces melamine.

I must now hasten to add that I do not know about conditions at these two plants. I don’t know if the two plants share a water source, if there are significant quantities of melamine in Mingshui’s effluent, or how the wheat gluten plant in Binzhou treats its incoming process water.

But right now, I’d say that the theory of impurities in the wheat gluten through use of melamine-contaminated process water looks as good as any.