by frog
I wonder how we would feel if a Chinese company operating in New Zealand were found to be responsible for the death one baby and made another 432 sick with kidney damage? Then the Chinese Premier steps in to defend the company, whose subsidiary had known about this for 6 months, and hopes that its reputation will not be tarnished. Oh, and the Chinese Trade Minister (or equivalent title) suggests that maybe the poisoning came from a different company all together. Meanwhile local New Zealanders all take the blame and the criminal responsibility for the incident.
Fonterra’s response to it’s subsidairy Sanlu Group, which had been using melamine (a substance used in plastics, fertilisers and glues and flame retardants) to make its milk powder protein levels appear higher, has human as well as economic implications.
Baby milk powder is one of those products that, thanks to huge multinational domination of the market, consumers have very little purchaser choice in any more. Which makes food safety and consumer choice that much more important. TVNZ reports:
Fonterra refused an interview. But the company should be fronting up, according to food safety advocate, Sue Kedgley.
Basically, in a situation like this, it is incumbent on Fonterra to be open and upfront. Depending on the level of Fonterra’s involvement, there are potentially very serious repercussions for Fonterra’s global reputation,” says Kedgley.
Published in Health & Wellbeing by frog on Mon, September 15th, 2008
Tags: babies, business, China, Fonterra, melamin, milk powder, sanlu, world bank
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
frog,
Fonterra fronted as reported in todays herald with the following statement
Helen Clark made the following statement (dont know how she got to be the Fonterra spokesperson. I guess with Winston peters no longer the foreign minister, this falls into the foreign ministers scope of endeavour?
Mabe Sue K needs to get up to speed?
Or Fornterra does not want to talk to her but will talk to the PM/Foreign Minister.
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I am wondering whether you are allowing your “dirty dairy” campaign to colour your views here Frog,
Fonterra only have 3 of the 7 board members on Sanlu, so they are unable to control what the company does.
Reports (granted spun by the NZ Govt) coming out seem to suggest Fonterra wanted a recall, but sanlu and local government would not listen to them, they resorted to raising it with the NZ Govt, who then raised it through the Ambassador in Beijing with the Central Government.
If you have evidence of Fonterra covering this up, can you please post it..
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Sorry Welly, I certainly did not mean to imply a conspiracy. I was saying imagine how this must look to Chinese people. You are right that Fonterra’s ‘dirty dairying campaign’ probably has coloured my views. Although I held off writing anything until I read the comments by the Prime Minister and the Trade Minister in the story I linked to above – which annoyed me. I’d rather we could for once talk about Fonterra in terms of the effect on humans and/or the environment rather than economics and trade.
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This does suggest the Chinese government is rather lax in enforcing food safety standards, and maybe it would be good if food had country of origin lables so people could choose to avoid things that seem a bit shonky.
But then there’d be cries of outrage and allegations of racism from the PC brigade, wouldn’t there?
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Fonterra is saying it was sabotage “down the supply line” and has been an issue for a while but was suppressed for the Olympics.
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I think it’d be the free market brigade more than anything – ‘government regulation bad’.
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