Buy Chinese, Buy Bad

The economists who speculate about the future trend of the Chinese economy tend to concentrate on such matters as the extent to which the country's exports will be affected by the world's economic slowdown. That might be the primary short term concern but the more significant one is the growing lack of trust that consumers can have in the sAfety and quality of Chinese made products.
The latest scandal, written about today in the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily, is the way that the industrial chemical and human poison melamine is used in animal feed. This case is far worse that the one earlier this year which resulted in the death of many dogs in the United States. This time it is people who are liable to suffer as the melamine travels through infected animals into the human food chain.
This week, said the China Daily report, four brands of eggs were found to contain the chemical and it quoted a story from the Nanfang Daily on Thursday which said it was an "open secret" in the livestock and fish food industry that melamine was mixed into animal feed. Melamine scrap was repackaged in to a product labelled "protein powder" and the sold to feed suppliers.