Thoughts from the Middle of Nowhere

Worried about losing access to foreign markets and stung by tainted food products scandals at home, China has in recent years tried to improve inspections, with limited success.

The problems the government faces are legion. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used in excess to boost yields while harmful antibiotics are widely administered to control disease in seafood and livestock. Rampant industrial pollution risks introducing heavy metals into the food chain.

Farmers have used cancer-causing industrial dye Sudan Red to boost the value of their eggs and fed an asthma medication to pigs to produce leaner meat. In a case that galvanized the public's and government's attention, shoddy infant formula with little or no nutritional value has been blamed for causing severe malnutrition in hundreds of babies and killing at least 12.

Over the past 25 years, Chinese agricultural exports to the U.S. surged nearly 20-fold to $2.26 billion last year, led by poultry products, sausage casings, shellfish, spices and apple juice.

Inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are able to inspect only a tiny percentage of the millions of shipments that enter the U.S. each year.

Even so, shipments from China were rejected at the rate of about 200 per month this year, the largest from any country, compared to about 18 for Thailand, and 35 for Italy, also big exporters to the U.S., according to data posted on the FDA's Web site.

A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for millions of years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a fruitless six-week search of its Yangtze River habitat.

The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.

For the baiji, the culprit was a degraded habitat — busy ship traffic, which confounds the sonar the dolphin uses to find food, and overfishing and pollution in the Yangtze waters of eastern China, the expedition said.

A half-mile section of China's Yellow River turned "red and smelly" after an unknown discharge was poured into it from a sewage pipe, state media said Monday.

The incident in Lanzhou, a city of 2 million people in western Gansu province, follows a string of industrial accidents that have poisoned major rivers in China over the last year, forcing several cities to shut down their water systems.

It wasn't immediately clear what was tainting the section of the Yellow River. Environmental protection officials took samples and were trying to determine whether the sewage was toxic, the official Xinhua news agency said.

At least four children among the hundreds of people sickened by emissions from a lead smelter in western China are likely to suffer permanent brain damage, state media said Friday.

A top Chinese environmental official said the factory was emitting 800 times the acceptable levels and accused local authorities of failing to do anything.

Some 250 children were still in hospital weeks after the mass poisoning case was uncovered in Hui county in Gansu province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Four are reported to have more than 450 milligrams of lead per liter of blood - a level that constitutes severe poisoning and that usually results in brain damage, Xinhua said.

The Agriculture Department is seeking to allow shipments of poultry processed in China, where thousands of birds and several people have died of bird flu.

Critics are urging the department to drop the proposal, and the U.S. industry is raising concerns about how it would affect consumers' perception of chicken safety. The United States does not accept poultry imports from countries where the virulent bird flu strain is present.

The Agriculture Department proposed the rule, with no announcement, on Nov. 23. The rule still must be finalized before it takes effect.

Online search engine leader Google has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the internet's fastest growing market.

To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit web content that the country's government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisions on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.

Although China has loosened some of its controls in recent years, some topics, such as Taiwan's independence and 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, remain forbidden subjects.

Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

"We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel.