There is a legal doctrine called "fair use" of an article.  You
can quote a reasonable portion of another published work to make your
point.  Well, I know this is pushing it.  But the Wall Street
Journal article on cadmium in Chinese food is quite astounding. It is
reprinted, from the front page of the paper, after the fold [I mean you
need to hit "read more"].

The cadmium is in the fertilizer, and in the soil, and then in
the plants.  Then they harvest the plants, put them in trucks,
take them to the factory, ship them to the U.S., stock them on Wal-Mart
shelves, and sell them to you.

The mercury is in the air, captured by raindrops, and transferred to the soil and groundwater.  Plants take up mercury.

Groundwater
is polluted by factory runoff, from smelters and mining operations,
then used by downstream farmers for irrigation.  Plants take up other heavy metals, including lead.

When the
FDA actually does test a load of imported food, it does not look for
heavy metals as agency employees look for filth, pesticides or
antibiotic residue.  Japan does look for heavy metals when
inspecting imported food from China.

         
July 2, 2007
   
PAGE ONE
China Faces a New Worry: Heavy Metals in the Food
Studies Warn of Produce Grown in ‘Hot Spot’ Soil;
Pingyang’s Ill Farmers

By NICHOLAS ZAMISKA and JANE SPENCER
July 2, 2007; Page A1

NANNING, China — For nearly two decades,
Lai Mandai regularly ate and sold beans, cabbage and watermelons grown
on a plot of land a short walk from a lead smelting plant in her
village.

Like dozens of other villagers who ate locally grown food, Ms. Lai, 39
years old, developed health problems. "When I did work, planting
vegetables or cleaning the floor, I felt so tired, and my fingers felt
numb," Ms. Lai says. "I talked with other villagers. They had the same
problems."

Ms. Lai, along with 57 other villagers, was eventually diagnosed with
high levels of cadmium, a heavy metal that can cause kidney disease and
softening of the bones. Runoff from the factory — which the government
tore down in 2004 — had contaminated the farmland and entered the food
supply. A Chinese government report found that rice grown in the
village contained 20 times the permitted level of cadmium.

China’s tainted food supply has fallen under heightened scrutiny after
a shipment of wheat flour contaminated with a chemical used in fire
retardants found its way into pet food and was linked to the deaths of
U.S. animals in late March. Concerns have since soared over the safety
of the country’s exports. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration
recently told consumers to stop buying toothpaste made in China because
it might contain poisonous diethylene glycol. Last week, the FDA
sounded an alarm on farm-raised seafood from China, citing excessive
levels of antibiotics and additives.

Yet after decades of industrial pollution, some of the worst
contaminants making their way into the country’s food come from the
soil in which it is grown. So far it hasn’t been determined the extent
to which tainted crops such as rice, fruits and vegetables have been
exported to the U.S. What is clear is that in contaminated areas
dotting the country, residents have been eating such food for years or
decades.

Pingyang, where Ms. Lai lives, is among the so-called hot spots in
China where farmland lying in the shadow of factory smokestacks or
mining operations has been contaminated by heavy metals. These elements
can cause a sweeping range of health problems, from brain damage to
cancer.

Chinese academics have written about such sites in more than a dozen
studies over the past two years in Chinese and international scientific
journals. In a study published earlier this year, researchers at the
Guangdong Institute of Ecology found excessive levels of cadmium and
mercury in Chinese cabbage grown in Foshan, a major manufacturing
center in southern China. Last year, researchers at Lanzhou University
published research showing that vegetables at four sites near the
mining and smelting city of Baiyin in the Northwestern Gansu province
contained hazardous levels of cadmium, lead and copper. A study of
crops grown in the central city of Chongqing found excessive lead and
cadmium levels in vegetables at 20 sites.

China’s government — which has been criticized by international
critics for downplaying the extent of other recent health threats –
has sounded an alarm. The Ministry of Land and Resources said in April
that heavy metals had contaminated about 13 million tons of grain, and
that 30.4 million acres, or more than 10% of the country’s arable land,
is contaminated by pollution.

Mounting Concerns

Concerns are mounting internationally as China plays a growing role in
the global food industry. The country’s exports currently account for
about 12% of global trade in fruits and vegetables. China’s
agricultural exports to the U.S. rose to $2.26 billion in 2006 from
$133 million in 1980, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Other governments, including Hong Kong and Japan, systematically test
imports from mainland China for metal contamination. But the U.S. FDA
says it does virtually no routine testing of food imports for metals.
Most of its standard tests on imports are aimed at identifying
pesticide residues. Some state health departments and retail chains do
their own testing for metals.

Foods from China containing high levels of lead have occasionally been
discovered on U.S. supermarket shelves. In 2005, California issued a
recall of sweet cured plums from the country after a routine spot test
by state health inspectors found "excessively high levels of lead that
could cause serious health problems."

The FDA says the potential for heavy-metal contamination is on its
radar, but its resources for testing are limited. "Our food supply is
globalizing, and we need to be very focused on what’s going on outside
our borders," says Michael Bolger, chief of the Chemical Hazard
Assessment Team at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied
Nutrition. The agency said there is scant evidence so far that heavy
metals in imports from China pose a health risk to Americans.

China’s soil contamination is caused by a range of factors. Mercury
released into the air by coal-fired power plants is captured by
raindrops, and transferred to the soil and groundwater. Groundwater is
also polluted by runoff from factories, smelters and mining operations,
and then used by farmers downstream from industrial operations to
irrigate their crops.

Even in rural areas, far from industrial sites, heavy use of
fertilizers has contributed to contamination. Fertilizers in China
often contain high levels of metals, especially cadmium, which is found
naturally in the same sedimentary rocks that contain plant-friendly
zinc.

Rudimentary sewage-treatment systems throughout much of China mean that
organic waste is routinely mixed with industrial waste. When sewage is
recycled into fertilizer, it may contain large amounts of metals and
other toxic material.

China’s contamination problem has been particularly acute in Pingyang,
a village on the outskirts of the southern provincial capital Nanning.
With small patches of farmland sprinkled among multistory apartment
buildings, Pingyang is a testament to the urban sprawl that has blurred
the lines between China’s countryside and cities. Residents plant green
vegetables next to construction sites. Corn rises behind factories.

In 1965, the local government built a smelting factory for lead and
antimony, a metal used in fireproofing electronics and other
applications. For decades, the factory discarded waste in piles near
farmland. Rains would wash the metals — including cadmium, a
lead-production byproduct — into farmers’ fields, and into the ponds
farmers used to water their crops.

A group of Chinese researchers arrived in Pingyang in 2002 after
hearing villagers’ complaints. They tested for cadmium, lead, zinc and
copper in residents’ blood and urine samples, as well as in vegetables
and soil from around the area. In a study published in the journal
Environment International in 2005, the researchers concluded that lead
levels in the soil taken from parts of the village were "extremely
high." It is possible that villagers were also exposed to dangerous
levels of cadmium in the air, researchers said.

Ms. Lai was among those poisoned. She had moved to Pingyang in 1989,
when she was 21 years old, leaving her family to live with her husband,
who worked in town as a welder. She first began to notice stiffness in
her joints and fatigue when she was around 30 years old, a few years
after she gave birth to her second son.

A senior official with the environmental agency in nearby Nanning, who
declined to give his name, said his agency began testing the soil near
Pingyang’s smelter as early as the 1980s, after villagers complained
about problems with the soil. After confirming the ground was
contaminated, his agency reported the problem to the local government
and suggested shutting the smelter down. Nobody listened, the official
says.

Poisonous Levels

Doctors from the Guangxi Institute of Occupational Disease Prevention
and Treatment in Nanning came to the village early this decade and
tested dozens of villagers, including Ms. Lai. Dozens were found with
poisonous levels of heavy metals, and doctors gave them medicine they
said would help clear the metals from their bodies. Ms. Lai says she
took the treatment for months, but that the doctors told her that the
metals failed to discharge from her body completely. She eventually
stopped the treatment.

The government tore the factory down in 2004. The orange trees in the
village are already growing better, she says, although her health
problems have persisted.

Xia Cheng, the deputy director of the Nanning Environment Protection
Bureau, says the agency cleaned much of the mine residue a decade ago.
It advises farmers not to plant there, and pays them a small amount in
compensation each year. Still, Mr. Xia says, villagers grow crops on
contaminated land. "The land is owned by farmers," he says. "We can’t
go to cut the crops off."

Lu Zuhua, an official with the agricultural service center in the town,
says the vegetables grown near the factory site are used for food by
the farmers and sold domestically.

Over the past five years, the Chinese government says it has increased
its testing of food exports for heavy metals, but there are still gaps.
"It’s very difficult for the authorities to check every batch," says
Chen Junshi of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

China’s soil is also compromised by waste from the thousands of private
and public mines that dot the country. Last year, a group of Chinese
scientists published a study that found the soil and vegetables around
an abandoned lead and zinc mine a few hours outside of Shanghai was
contaminated with heavy metals. It’s not clear when the mine was in
operation, but the local environmental protection bureau says that
historical records indicated it was in use during the Qing dynasty,
which ended in 1911. Slag that the miners had excavated from the
mountain was left in piles near farmland, allowing rain to wash the
metals into nearby fields.

Chinese scientists tested samples of soil and vegetables, including
cabbage, chrysanthemum and spinach grown in the area around the mine,
near Shaoxing in Zhejiang province. The soil’s zinc level was 20 times
higher, and cadmium levels 30 times higher, than the maximum
heavy-metal concentrations allowed under China’s national soil-quality
standards.

The authors of the study, which was published in February 2006 in the
Netherlands-based scientific journal Environmental Geochemistry and
Health, concluded that soil near the mine "was unsuitable for
agricultural use." Because of high levels of cadmium, lead and arsenic,
the vegetables "could not be regarded as safe for human consumption,"
they wrote.

Huang Wei, an official in the news office of the Zhejiang Provincial
Environmental Protection Bureau in Hangzhou, says there have been no
health problems or crop failures tied to soil contamination in the
area, adding that residents haven’t lodged any complaints with local
environmental officials. While metal pollution is a serious problem in
theory, she says, the soil at the Shaoxing site would have to be tested
further.

Heavy-metal residues stay in the soil — cadmium for decades, lead for
tens of thousands of years — so fixing the existing problem won’t be
easy. Chinese researchers at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou have
teamed up with researchers from the University of Glasgow in Scotland
to identify a cadmium-resistant rice strain, and they are exploring the
process of genetically modifying crops to make them more resistant to
absorbing metals.

Some of the farmers in Shaoxing have heard about the pollution, but
believe the soil has improved as years have passed since the mine’s
closure. "Before, our rice paddies didn’t grow very well," says Xu
Yingfu, the 58-year-old deputy head of Baojiashan village, who has
grown rice, wheat, radishes and green vegetables for years. "The plants
were small."

Twice a year, Mr. Xu travels to a nearby town and sells his rice for
around 10 cents a pound to wholesalers. One of the shops that buys rice
from farmers and sells it to locals is Sunshine Grain & Edible Oil
Center, in the nearby town of Shangyu. "Rich families buy rice from
other provinces from northeastern China because it’s better quality,"
says Ren Qingzhao, a 42-year-old shopkeeper at Sunshine Grain. "Poor
families buy local rice."

What the farmer Mr. Xu doesn’t sell, he and his family eat. At his home
in Baojiashan village, which is a short walk from his fields, a bowl of
rice that he grew sits in a strainer on the kitchen counter beneath
turquoise cabinets. "This is for dinner tonight. It’s delicious," he
says. On this particular night, he plans on serving it with a fried
mixture of green vegetables, pumpkin and pork.

Amid a global boom in commodity prices, a government-run company that
owns the long-dormant mine now plans to reopen it. A notice in a local
newspaper said that the mine would extract 30,000 metric tons of lead
and zinc from the mountain annually. The notice invites the public to
submit comments or suggestions by letter, fax or email.

There’s no evidence that contaminated crops from Shaoxing county are
exported to the U.S. A local vegetable-processing company buys produce,
including cabbage grown around the area; its frozen, vacuum-sealed
packages are exported to countries including Japan and the U.S.,
according to Meng Louyun, an official at an agricultural service center
in Shaoxing. But he says none of the vegetables come from farms near
the old mine.

In the U.S., some public-health experts worry the government is not
testing enough imported food for heavy metals. "It’s less stringent
than Germany or Japan," says Rufus Chaney, a research agronomist at the
USDA. "It’s the luck of the draw, not preparation that’s protected us."

–Ellen Zhu in Shanghai contributed to this article.

Write to Nicholas Zamiska at nicholas.zamiska@wsj.com4 and Jane Spencer at jane.spencer@wsj.com5

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