Don’t drink the milk?

As the Paralympics was closing in Beijing, reports began to emerge of a scheme involving the adulteration of milk and milk products with melamine. Chinese and Western television stations reported that increasing numbers of infants were being hospitalized as a result of developing kidney stones after being fed the contaminated product. Melamine is an industrial chemical which, when added to milk and milk products, artificially boosts its protein content thus improving its value to wholesalers. When added to fresh milk it can pass factory quality tests undetected.

Within a couple of days of the closing ceremony, two children were reported dead and 13,000 hospitalized. Television news reports showed long lines of anxious parents with small children queuing in front of hospitals. By today - Monday, the 20th - the toll was 4 children dead, more than 100 seriously ill and 50,000 in hospital. The potential total could well be in the hundreds of thousands. The current number is now expanding to include children throughout the Asia Pacific region. The Australian News Network reported today that a child in Singapore fed on contaminated Chinese milk has been hospitalized with kidney damage.

According to current reports, on the China Daily News website, the country's largest dairy - Sanlu - became aware of the contamination about six weeks ago and warned their New Zealand part owner – Fonterra – of the emerging problem. Fonterra in turn alerted the New Zealand government who then communicated the information to the Chinese government. At that point the problem seems to have gone underground. With the Beijing Olympics about to open, whoever in the Chinese government had received the information from New Zealand completely miscalculated the potential seriousness of the problem and apparently referred the problem to local officials. The problem has now come back above ground in a big way. Mothers of children interviewed on the streets this weekend were openly critical of the government for having failed to protect the public. By Sunday, Chinese television news showed Prime Minister Wen Biaojao on the streets of Beijing; apologizing for errors in government safety inspection standards and reassuring the public that action would be taken. The unacceptable face of raw capitalism – a view that increasingly troubles the Chinese people – is again on display.

According to China Daily News, two brothers named Geng in Hebei province were almost immediately arrested and charged with producing and selling toxic and hazardous food products. The elder brother runs a private milk collection center and has admitted having added melamine to his milk since the end of last year. He did so, he is reported to have said, when he incurred a large financial loss after Sanlu rejected his product several times for failing to meet its standards. Asked by police investigators if he knew the consequences of mixing melamine with milk he is reported to have said that his own family never drank the contaminated milk.

Nineteen other people connected to the milk collection business have so far been arrested including one suspected of selling melamine illegally. The Party secretary of Hebei province has promised that the guilty will get “severe” punishment because “we owe the people an explanation”. That punishment is likely to be death, the heaviest penalty for a crime like this under China’s Criminal Law Code.

That will conclude this episode, at least as far as its perpetrators are concerned, but Geng’s reply to the investigators indicates a deeper problem. He evidently knew that he was selling a poisonous product, disguised as milk, to Sanlu and he knew that it would damage and possibly kill their customers. At least nineteen other “businessmen” appear to have colluded with him in this. There is no way that this product could not be traced back to them, as was immediately the case, when the damage reports began to roll in. The penalties for this sort of behavior in China are extreme, public and publicized. And yet they did it anyway. The criminality of the act is mind-boggling but so is the stupidity. Sheer greed for money appears to have overridden this man’s sense of self-preservation. Geng is not typical in any way of the entrepreneurs of China but there are enough like him to discredit and sabotage the Chinese experiment with capitalism. Somehow, they have to figure out a way to get the Gengs out of the system before they can do fatal damageto that experiment.

On a less serious note, I was worried that our local supermarket would strip all milk products from their shelves as soon as Sanlu, their biggest supplier, was identified as a source of the problem. I can’t drink coffee without milk. So I hurried over there to buy what I could but I needn’t have worried. The baby milk products were indeed off the shelves but the rest were piled on skids and on sale, at an irresistible price.