The Grocery Manufacturers of America said this in 2003 about labeling meat, produce and seafood as to country of origin.
“Forcing U.S. businesses to incur such high costs with ‘negligible’ consumer benefits is a fallacy,” continued Stafford. “It is obvious to GMA and its member companies that these rules need to be repealed by Congress and replaced with a viable, voluntary labeling system that will actually benefit American producers and consumers. An example of a successful, voluntary labeling system is USDA’s organic labeling program.”
Now the GMA wants more regulation, after realizing we don't trust imported food for good reason, has changed its tune:
[T]he Grocery Manufacturers Association's is "trying to get ahead of the regulation curve," while consumers need more government intervention and inspections. "Once somebody is sick, we think that is much too late," he said.
But the industry opposes a fee on imports to pay for testing it should be doing itself. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin has proposed a $20 fee in imported seafood, fruits and vegetables regulated by FDA to fund FDA testing.
China's minister of public security, Li Runsen, is also a director of a U.S. incorporated company, China Security and Surveillance Technology (CSST). Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson comments that the Chinese police state provides almost unlimited investment opportunities for our hedge funds.
CSST, according to Terence Yap, its chief financial officer, produces security cameras and computer software that can monitor crosswalks -- to ensure that demonstrations aren't forming -- and cross-check the faces of Internet cafe users against photos of known troublemakers.
An authoritarian government can never be sure how many of its citizens would relish its demise, which means the Chinese Communist Party has 1.3 billion potential targets for surveillance. Bradsher reports that 660 Chinese cities have begun installing high-tech surveillance systems. By one estimate, high-end surveillance will expand from a $500 million industry in 2003 to a $43 billion industry by 2010.
CSST has received $110 million in convertible loans from the Citadel Group, a Chicago-based hedge fund, which it has used to buy up smaller Chinese surveillance companies. Some Wall Street executives have even defended their investments by equating the Chinese surveillance system with the surveillance cameras of London and New York.
Our national interest or globalization. Which wins?
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, "It's not appropriate to interfere in the private decisions of Americans to invest in legally incorporated firms."
"More trade" is the number one policy of our federal government, even trumping national security as we can see with the multi-dimensional China issue. "More Trade Agreements" is the questionable method of pursuing the Prime Directive - despite the lack of quantifiable link between those bulky trade documents and actual increased trade (see the WTO study on this).
Food safety has been an irritating pebble in the shoe of the globalists. The environment could be the next pebble, conflicting with the Prime Directive. (Of course there are many potential pebbles, amounting to a load of gravel).
We know that every smokestack the U.S. outsources to Asia increases CO2 pollution by up to eight times. Scrubbers and efficient energy methods are not the enforced norm in Asia.
But the transportation pollution itself is astounding. Supply chains that are several thousand miles long have fossil fuel burning engines humming in aircrafts, ships and ports that would not otherwise be humming as much.
Thomas Friedman, a NY Times regular op-ed columnist who has not resolved his green-ness with his I-like-all-trade-agreements-but-don't-read-them position, points out that a single transworld route for a major European delivery company has major environmental consequences.
“We operate 35,000 trucks and 48 aircraft in Europe. We just bought two Boeing 747s, which, when fully operational, will do nine round trips every week between our home base in Liège [Belgium] and Shanghai. They leave Liège only partly full and every day fly back to Europe as full as you can stuff them with iPods and computers. By our calculations, just these two 747s will use as much fuel each week as our 48 other aircraft combined and emit as much CO2. [says Peter Bakker, the chief executive of TNT, the biggest express delivery company in Europe].”
Friedman says this is because the world is becoming "Americans" in the bad sense of resource consumption, but does not connect the issue to his trade lust.
Chinese government and companies sometimes say we will have our labs test products for safety, then you will trust us. But now we see that does not work either.
More toy recalls are hiding behind the corporate curtains in the U.S. - Target, Dollar General, and Discount School Supply for example. These companies have found lead painted toys, but have not announced it because the Consumer Product Safety Commission is investigating or negotiating recall terms.
Shalom International imports jewelry in New York. It recalled 280,000 children's rings this year though a Chinese testing lab it hired in December - CMA Testing and Certification Laboratories in Hong Kong - allegedly tested and passed the goods.
“You can’t trust the Chinese to do what they say they are doing,” Mr. Green [V.P. of Shalom] said. “They all say, ‘We are using lead-free paint and lead-free components.’ Experience shows they are not.”
There are a lot of ways to say you are testing, but are not really testing.
Do you wipe the painted surface for dust? If there is no dust, you don't get lead. Do you test paint chips? If so, do you you use "Atomic Spectrometry" to show the volume of lead in a sample, or the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) to determine how the lead would leach out in a landfill?
Do you use standardized collection methods for collecting samples? Do you use standard practice to prepare the sample for testing?
Is a portable XRF instrument used? Is that instrument operated according to accepted procedures? Was substrate correction done? What units are the results reported in?
Were the lab technicians trained properly? Was contamination of the sample avoided?
There are a lot of ways to say you are "testing", but you are not.
John Barrasso was named to replace the late Senator Craig Thomas from Wyoming. The Wyoming State Republican Committee made sure their nominee, appointed by Dem Gov Freudenthal, was right on ag issues.
Barrasso said today he disagreed with the USDA decision to allow more Canadian cattle imports in light of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) risks. He also has vowed to fight for mandatory country of origin labeling. A good first start.
Senator Enzi from Wyoming has also been right on these issues, by the way.
