05.20
[T]he highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week’s resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up. (free registration is required)
Just as I was reading this Post article I turned to a Lou Dobb’s report about tainted Chinese seafood imports and so the confluence of events just made me want to comment. I have to say though, this is one case (the tainted seafood only) where I have to agree with my Chinese colleague who says that this is a perfect example of a growing anti-Chinese bias in some quarters of the US. While I am sure that there is some level of poor quality seafood entering in the US from China…I also think that a close inspection of US based seafood would find similar problems. I think the problem is not that China is trying to get one over on the US but rather that poor US inspection might be allowing a disproportionate amount slip into the country and thereby onto our tables. Moreover, having spent spent over a decade in China (and eating fish in the seafood capital of Dalian for most of that decade) I wonder just how bad Chinese seafood is?
With respect to seafood, it is so political it isn’t even funny. I am going to have to be somewhat careful here since my firm represents a number of large seafood importers, but much of what is going on is a complete joke. You’ve got some politcally minded yahoo (so much for my being careful here) down in Alabama who is so deep into the Alabama seafood coalition…. (my ending the sentence here is my way of being careful) and who is saying things that I view (note this is my opinion only and may or may not be based on facts) as racist and xenophobic. Then we have the FBI out there (or so I have been told) reminding importers that China and Vietnam are communist and that these are not the kinds of countries with which we should be dealing. It’s a bad situation made far worse by a politically savvy domestic industry (cartel?). Don’t even get me started. . . .
The problem is that the importers are not united and they very much want to stay under the radar on these issues because they do not want the public to know how incredibly much fish is imported. My firm did a case where we were the lawyers acting as amicus curie for the seafood industry trying to help out an importer who had nearly $2 million in crab seized for purportedly illegal fishing. The laws on this favor the domestic industry but we lost.
I am hugely proud to be an American, but the way we have acted in these issues makes me ashamed.
I am impressed you are writing about this because for the most part it is ignored.