America's Future Update on China

Update on Cheating by the Chinese

China intentionally mixed an industrial chemical called melamine into pet food and animal feed imported by U.S. companies and sold here under more than 100 brand names. Melamine, a byproduct of pesticides, is used to make plastics. Melamine has no nutritional value. Because it is high in nitrogen, the Chinese had been putting it into wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate in order to trick Americans into thinking they are buying feed with higher protein content.

The Food and Drug Administration discovered this deception when our pets started dying. Melamine contamination is implicated in some 4,000 cat and dog deaths; 60 million packages of pet food have been recalled; 6,000 hogs in eight states may have been fed salvage products containing tainted rice gluten, and several hundred may have entered our human food supply.

China finally agreed to allow the U.S. to do some inspection of food processing in China. But our inspection cannot produce U.S.-style safety because of the spread-out food- processing industry in that vast country where poisonings from tainted products are common.

Update on Trade with China

In 2000, the Clinton Administration conned American farmers into being the principal lobbyists for passage of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with Communist China, which gave Chinese goods unconditional access to U.S. markets. Bill Clinton promised this would be a win-win for American agriculture and predicted that our farmers would increase their average annual exports to China by $1.5 billion.

But globalization turned out to be a big cheat. Department of Commerce figures now show that U.S. wheat exports to China are less today than before PNTR was passed. China's food exports to the United States have become a $2.1 billion industry.

China doesn't have health, sanitary or safety standards that Americans expect for our food supply. Chinese farmers use pesticides that are not approved for use in the U.S. The UN estimates that 300 million Chinese suffer food poisoning every year. Sometimes, it's from bad sanitation, sometimes from deliberate fraud, but it's a lot of problems we don't have in America and don't want to have. Our FDA inspects only 1.3% of imported food.

Update on China and Global Warming

China will overtake the U.S. this year as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China is sending far more carbon emissions from its rapidly increasing coal-fired power stations than are coming from the entire U.S., according to the International Energy Agency. China is the world's biggest coal producer, burning over 2 billion tons of coal per year. Sulphur dioxide and soot caused by coal combustion results in acid rain, which now falls on 30% of China's total land area. China has 16 of the world's most air-polluted cities.

The Chinese have not been open to any plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions, as they feel they should be entirely free to pursue economic growth. Under the proposed Kyoto treaty (the UN climate-change treaty), only the developed nations have to make emissions cuts.

Future prospects for getting China to help address the climate-change problem are bleak. In the next 8 years, China is planning to install as much new energy-generating plants as currently exist in all the 25 EU countries, and 90% would be coal-fired, which produces the most carbon dioxide. Perhaps China needs Al Gore's movie.