Owner Of Gluten Factory Razes Facility Days Before Scheduled Arrival Of FDA Team - LA Times

XUZHOU, CHINA — Before Mao Lijun's business exported tainted wheat products that may have killed American pets, his factory sickened people and plants around here for years. Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao's factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao's company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke — until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

It wasn't authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory — days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients. In the end, Chinese authorities caught up with Mao and arrested him. And Tuesday, after weeks of denials, China acknowledged that Mao's company and another Chinese business had illegally exported wheat and rice products spiked with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fertilizers. That chemical is banned in foods in the U.S. China's watchdog agency said the businesses had added melamine to the food ingredients "in a bid to meet the contractual demand for the amount of protein in the products." Melamine can make animal feed appear to have more protein than it actually does.

Besides turning up in pet food, melamine has been found in feed for thousands of hogs and millions of chickens in the U.S. The FDA said Tuesday that melamine-contaminated foods also were fed to fish raised for human consumption. But in each case, U.S. officials said there was little risk to human health.

The FDA also said that although the tainted Chinese products were labeled as wheat gluten and rice protein, they were actually ordinary wheat flour — with melamine and related nitrogen-rich compounds. Melamine producers in China have said that melamine scrap, a cheaper form of the chemical, has been widely sold to entrepreneurs who use it to fool farmers into thinking that they are getting higher-nutrient animal feeds. Among the apparent buyers of melamine scrap were Mao, head of Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., and Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. in Shandong province.

EDIT

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-petfood9may09,0,6710026.story

Or is it the other way around?

:eyes:

Right Wing Free Marketeers would proclaim that the market will adjust to account for these poisonings, and that no additional regulation or inspection is needed. Deaths, ill health and environmental damage are written-off as externalities -- which are accounted for by limiting lawsuits.

Watch for some rightwing business group to give Lijun an award.

They ought to hire him to advise McCain, since he can't run for president. He's got all their tactics down pat: cheat, steal, lie, destroy evidence, flee.

Okay it does say maybe two guys.

But really one or two manufacturing sites in China were the cause of most of the animal feed in the US being harmful to their health? All it took was one bulldozer to correct our entire country's animal food problem.

That is really hard to believe.

Run away and let one of your henchmen take the bullet.

deliberately add melamine to their "food powders," they lied about what the powders were, claiming whole wheat flour was both wheat gluten and rice protein.

They have picked up on the worst of Western business practices pretty quickly. Perhaps they studied those of a former ambassador to China.

don't you find it strange that he had advance warning of the visit?

Remember, this was not a surprise swoop on a US producer, it was an arranged
visit to a foreign supplier so - in answer to your question - no, I don't
find it at all strange that he had "advance warning of the visit".

The only surprising bit is that he left it that late before torching
the place ... maybe he was counting on "diplomacy" taking a bit longer
than it did?