The charges from the probe, called “Project Honeygate,” mark the culmination of a two-part investigation that began in 2008 and included U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. attorney’s office in the northern district of Illinois. In the first phase, federal authorities charged 14 individuals for allegedly evading about $80 million in anti-dumping duties.

The latest phase of the investigation included an undercover agent, who took a role as director of procurement with a cooperating honey supplier. The resulting investigation led to two of the nation’s largest honey suppliers — Honey Holding and Groeb Farms Inc. — entering into deferred prosecution agreements with the government and paying $1 million and $2 million in fines, respectively.

[…] U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat who has pushed federal officials to crack down on counterfeit honey imports, said the “successful sting operation is sure to be a buzz kill for would-be honey smugglers.”

“We need a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to honey laundering,” Schumer said in a statement.

The Associated Press’ Alexa Olesen examined the debate over anti-dumping tariffs and problems associated with honey smuggling in 2010 (via Tom Hancock):

Honey-laundering is just one of many unsavory practices that have besmirched China’s vast honey industry and raised complaints from competing American beekeepers. China produces more honey than anywhere else in the world, about 300,000 metric tons (660 million pounds) a year or about 25 percent of the global total. But stocks are tainted with a potentially dangerous antibiotic and cheaper honeys are increasingly getting passed off as more expensive varieties.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized 64 drums of Chinese honey tainted with chloramphenicol, an antibiotic, at a warehouse in Philadelphia. Last year, the agency said two Chinese honey shipments were found to contain the drug, which is approved for medical use but banned in food products because in rare cases it can cause aplastic anemia, a potentially fatal illness.

Experts say quality problems are hard to avoid in a business dominated by small manufacturers, many of whom are poor and uneducated.

[…] “If their bees got sick, the first thing in their mind is saving their bees instead of caring about the quality of honey,” said Wei, a honey dealer from Chengde in central China’s Henan province. “They can’t afford the loss of bees.”

In the more recent case, according to the AFP, ICE deputy director Daniel Ragsdale “was quick to insist there was ‘no health and safety risk’ despite some of the 4,900 barrels of seized honey being adulterated with antibiotics not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.”

Besides the dangers of direct ingestion, agricultural antibiotic use can accelerate the development of drug-resistant bacteria: see recent posts at CDT and IHT Rendezvous.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, anti-dumping, antibiotics, honey, honey laundering, smuggling
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Overconsumption among humans is not the only problem, however. Among the various side effects of China’s surging meat consumption is the large-scale adoption of American-style intensive farming techniques, including routine preventative dosing of animals. A paper published last week by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science and Michigan State University documents the consequent proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria at three large pig farms around China. From Maryn McKenna at Wired:

If you’ve followed news about food in China (at this blog or elsewhere), you’ll have seen that regulation of food safety is failing under the twin pressures of needing to produce a lot of protein and wanting to make a lot of money. (I think of food in China as being where the United States was before Upton Sinclair came along.) This lack of regulation is as true for agricultural antibiotic use as it is for other aspects of food production. China is both the largest producer and the largest consumer of antibiotics in the world, and it is putting almost half of its annual production into agriculture: about 96 million kilograms, which by my math (using the newest ADUFA numbers in my last post) works out to about 7 times what the US is using each year.

[…] To quote from the paper: “The diverse set of resistance genes detected potentially confer resistance to all major classes of antibiotics, including antibiotics critically important for human medicine.”

[…] Their summation:

The diversity and abundance of (antibiotic resistance genes) reported in this study is alarming and clearly indicates that unmonitored use of antibiotics and metals on swine farms has expanded the diversity and abundance of the antibiotic resistance reservoir in the farm environment. The coenrichment of ARGs and transposases further exacerbates the risks of transfer of ARGs from livestock animals to human-associated bacteria, and then spread among human populations.

Overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is still a major problem in the United States, where 80% of all antibiotics sold are consumed by farm animals and the industry has fought beak and trotter to resist regulation. In a New York Times report last September, Sabrina Tavernise summed up the stakes:

Antibiotics are considered the crown jewels of modern medicine. They have transformed health by stopping infections since they went into broad use after World War II. But many scientists say that their effectiveness is being eroded by indiscriminate use, both to treat infections in people and to encourage growth in chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs.

Whatever the cause, resistant bacteria pose significant public health risks. Routine infections once treated with penicillin pills now require hospitalizations and intravenous drip antibiotics, said Cecilia Di Pentima, director of clinical services at the Infectious Diseases Division at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Pediatrics. Infections from such strains of bacteria are believed to cause thousands of deaths a year.

“The single biggest problem we face in infectious disease today is the rapid growth of resistance to antibiotics,” said Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. “Human use contributes to that, but use in animals clearly has a part too.”

See further discussion of “the doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics” at the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2010, and a Telegraph report on antibiotic overuse in China and its dangers from the same year.

Last month, Shanghai-based researchers shed new light on one process by which bacteria develop resistance. From Alice Yan at South China Morning Post:

Now researchers at Fudan University’s Shanghai Medical College say they have uncovered an important mechanism leading to resistance. The team, led by Professor Alastair Murchie, a British molecular biologist, said in a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Cell last week, that they had found a special section of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in some infectious bacteria that could make antibiotics useless.

[…] Murchie said that while aminoglycoside antibiotics accounted for only about 20 per cent of all antibiotics, the research was important because drug resistance remained a significant threat due to the way it evolved and emerged.

“It’s important that we understand the underlying mechanism [of] why resistance happens, how are the bacteria so flexible and why do they respond so well to treatment by antibiotics?” Murchie said.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, agriculture policy, antibiotics, Chinese Academy of Science, disease, meat, Ministry of Health, pork, public health, research, United States, world health organization
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Given China’s vast and growing population and increasing appetite for meat, it’s no surprise the nation’s leaders have been scrambling for years to intensify food production along the US model.

Lately, however, the Chinese government appears to be questioning two key tenants of US industrial-ag dogma: 1) that daily low-level doses of antibiotics are necessary and desirable for livestock production, and 2) that genetically modified crops are safe to eat ….

China will obviously exert plenty of influence over how the world feeds itself over the next generation. It’s interesting to see the nation show signs, at least, of straying from the US model it so tightly embraced over the previous generation.

From Greenpeace, on the 5-10 year suspension of GM rice and wheat commercialisation:

Greenpeace welcomes and supports this move by the government. “This step is a milestone in the process to end all GE rice commercialization in China,” said Greenpeace Food and Agriculture campaigner Pan Wenjing.

GE crop’s long-term risks on human health and the environmental are still unknown. It has also been found that many of the GE rice lines in China are embedded with non-Chinese patents, which poses a huge risk on China’s food security should they become commercialized.

“Rice is the main staple food for 1.3 billion Chinese people. Any decisions related to rice must be taken seriously and must include the people’s opinions,” said Pan Wenjing.

See also China’s Counterfeiters Get Seedy, on the increasingly common sale of ordinary seeds as GM or otherwise sought-after varieties.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture policy, antibiotics, food security, genetically altered food, greenpeace
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

To many Chinese patients, antibiotics are silver bullets: a cure for everything from skin infections to life-threatening lung ailments; and if a little is good, then more must be better”especially if you can get dosed directly through an intravenous line…

But keeping the peace in the waiting room may be contributing to one of the most troubling issues facing medicine today. Worldwide, overuse of antibiotics is increasing the resistance of bacteria to drugs, leading to stubborn, virulent infections that are invulnerable to almost everything doctors can throw at them.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: antibiotics, health, medicine, public health
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall