SHANGHAI, June 27 — After weeks of insisting that food here is largely safe, regulators in China said Tuesday that they had recently closed 180 food plants and that inspectors had uncovered more than 23,000 food safety violations.
The nationwide crackdown, which began in December, also found that many small food makers were using industrial chemicals, dyes and other illegal ingredients in making a range of food products, everything from candy to seafood.
The announcement came as part of a sweeping overhaul of this country’s food safety regulations in the aftermath of a series of international food scares involving Chinese exports.
The country’s exports of contaminated vegetable protein earlier this year triggered one of the largest pet food recalls in American history.
Tainted food ingredients also leeched into American meat and fish supplies, and other problem foods, such as tainted fish, have turned up in Europe and other parts of Asia.
China has strongly denied that its food exports are hazardous and has seemingly retaliated in recent weeks by seizing American and European imports.
Earlier this week, China said it had impounded two shipments of food from the United States because the orange pulp and apricots contained “excessive amounts of bacteria and mould.”
And earlier this year, regulators blocked imports of Evian water from France, saying bacteria levels in the water exceeded national standards.
Still, the government has moved aggressively in recent months to enforce the nation’s food safety regulations and to crack down on fake and counterfeit foods.
But Tuesday’s announcement, which appeared on the web site of the country’s top quality watchdog, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, has added fuel to concerns about rampant fraud in the food industry here.
Regulators said 33,000 law enforcement officials combed the nation and turned up illegal food making dens, counterfeit bottled water, fake soy sauce, banned food additives and illegal meat processing plants.
“These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department told the state-run media.
China Daily, the nation’s English language newspaper, said industrial chemicals, including dyes, mineral oils, paraffin wax, formaldehyde and malachite green, had been found in everything from candy, pickles and biscuits to seafood.
Regulators said they also learned that sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid were being used to process shark fin and ox tendon.
These industrial chemicals are often toxic or corrosive and can be used in everything from drain cleaners, detergent and fertilizer to surfboard wax.
These types of findings have become all too common in China. For instance, in 2005, officials in south China found a company repackaging food waste and shipping it to 10 other regions. And just last week, officials said a company in Anhui province, not far from Shanghai, was selling a two-year-old rice dumpling mix as fresh, according to the state-controlled media.
Experts here say the problem is that the country’s food regulations are not being enforced and small businessmen feel they need to go to extraordinary lengths to make a profit.
Corruption and bribery have also infected the food and drug industry here.
The former head of the nation’s food and drug watchdog was recently sentenced to death for accepting bribes and approving the licensing of substandard drugs. And now, a Ministry of Agriculture official is on trial in Beijing for accepting bribes in exchange for endorsing food products.
But not all the problems stem from corruption or malfeasance. A.T. Kearney issued a report this week saying one cause of food safety problems is a lack of cold storage and logistics systems.
The consulting firm said China needs to invest about $100 billion over the next 10 years to upgrade its logistics and cold storage capabilities and to implement new standards.
In China, the study said, there are only about 30,000 cold storage trucks. In the U.S., there are about 280,000.
“In the entire supply chain there’s no common standard or world class standard,” said Zhang Bing, who helped prepare the study. “There are a lot of things contributing to the food safety problem. There are companies putting chemicals into food. But there’s also a lot of spoilage.”
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