The Citizen

July 12, 2007

Fong Kong is township slang for shoddy goods or services. And the latent xenophobia which underlies this term is exacerbated by scare stories about imports from China. The latest casualties are Eastern Cape pineapple farmers, who will lose about R70 million because fertiliser which they bought from Hong Kong contained excessive amounts of cadmium, a heavy metal. This comes not long after South African dog food was found to include gluten contaminated with toxic melamine, also from China. And there have been similar scandals regarding toothpaste, among other products.It is not our aim here to indulge in scare-mongering about all Chinese imports. But certainly there is a need for special vigilance about what is brought in from that vast country.China itself admits to problems with quality control. Just this week Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, was executed for corruption after he allowed a range of sub-standard products to be exported. When commenting on the sentence, Yan Jiangying, spokesman for the Chinese FDA, said "The food and drug safety situation is not something we can be optimistic about."Despite this drastic measure by the Chinese authorities, we doubt whether safety standards will suddenly improve.Our concern is that South Africa needs to tighten up radically on food security measures both internally and for products crossing our borders in either direction.The reject pineapples were detected not by South Africans but by Swiss controllers. South Africa has laws and regulations in place to prevent such movement of potentially harmful goods.But these rules are worthless unless they are enforced.