NEW YORK, July 12 China is just one of a number of countries that have recently exported unsafe or defective food, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration data.
Though China has come under fire lately for problems with contamination of fish, pet food and other products, countries like Mexico, India and Denmark have more frequently run into trouble with federal inspectors, the New York Times reports.
An FDA database shows that shipments of produce from the Dominican Republic and Danish candy was refused by federal authorities nearly twice as many times as Chinese seafood in 2006. Indian basmati rice and some spices have also been blocked.
The data could, however, be a somewhat misleading picture of export safety because the FDA only inspects about 1 percent of all shipments and the database only includes data from one year, the newspaper reports.
A Mexican official said the database exaggerates the country's food safety problem because of the greater volume of U.S. trade, and ground shipments receive greater scrutiny than other shipments.
An Indian embassy spokesman told the Times that food safety is rapidly improving, despite the difficulty of imposing standards on many small-scale manufacturers.
Critics say the danger is a symptom of the agency's inability to cope with the dramatic increase in the volume of imports in recent years.
But Carl Nielsen, former FDA director of import policy, said the concerns are just the natural result of increased globalization.
Copyright 2007 by UPI
