How are Chinese people taking the world from the dining table to the graveyard?

Although the authorities of many countries have tried but Chinese shrimp and seafood dishes to help bring consumers from the table to the cemetery faster still appear rampant in the market.

If viewed from the air, the Chau Giang-China river delta looks crisscrossed with fish and shrimp ponds of hundreds of thousands of households interspersed with a series of livestock cages. It is not difficult to understand that this is the same center of aquaculture agriculture in the world's most seafood producing country.

The Chinese agricultural industry has for thousands of years been so familiar with the form of barn ponds, when the wastes of breeding facilities are made for fish and farmed fish. However, with the development of antibiotics as well as the passion for profits, this model is now strongly affected.

On farms in Jiangmen or some areas of Guangdong-China, farmers mix a lot of antibiotics into pig feed and waste from these pigsty with extremely high levels of antibiotics to feed shrimp. fish.

Normally, Chinese farmers will mix at least 3 types of antibiotics in pig feed including Colistin , a banned antibiotic for use in the US.

If you look at the garbage cans around these farms, one can easily see the boxes of about 9 different antibiotics. Of these, 7 are assessed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as having a great influence on the human body.

Antibiotic shells are littered around aquaculture and livestock farms in Guangdong.

Super virus and death unannounced

Antibiotic abuse is creating viruses and drug-resistant epidemics that headaches researchers. The British government estimates that around 700,000 people worldwide die from antibiotics against antibiotics every year. If this situation continues without action from the governments of the country, this figure could reach 10 million people every year by 2050, higher than the number of deaths from cancer.

In 2015, scientists announced a worldwide shocking information. They discovered a Colistin resistance gene in China , thereby turning dozens of bacteria and diseases in the country into current antibiotic-resistant viruses.

Worse, since then people have found these genes in a wide range of patients, food or environmental models in more than 20 different countries, especially those that import a lot of food from China. .

According to Professor Mrtin Blaser of the Langone-US Medical Center and President of President Obama's advisory council on the issue of virus, it is the Chinese food source that is the biggest cause for the whole world to be infected. spread the risk of virus.

Studies have shown that about 90% of antibiotics in pig feed are excreted in urine and feces, which is an essential source of nutrition for aquaculture in China. In addition, farmers also mix antibiotics for aquaculture feed, causing the concentration of drugs in fish and pond water here to unprecedented high.

Chinese farmers often mix a lot of antibiotics into animal feed.

More dangerous, the wastewater flows of these livestock areas are discharged directly into rivers and lakes. Specifically, farms in Jiangmen discharge wastewater directly into the western China basin, thereby polluting the entire Pearl River Delta region, including Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao, and Shenzhen. .

A 2013 study showed that each year the area of ​​rivers and lakes here receives about 213 tons of antibiotics discharged annually, a number that many people fear.

The United Nations (UN) data show that China's seafood trade turnover is about USD 90 billion and accounts for 50% of transactions worldwide. The country also supplies about 60% of seafood to the global market and is the world's largest seafood exporter.

An aquaculture area in Guangdong.

Even the US government has recognized the danger from Chinese food for more than 10 years but they cannot prevent it completely. A 2006 survey by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Chinese seafood imports showed that as many as a quarter of samples contained banned substances or unsafe additives.

In the same year, the FDA itself had to enact all shipments of shrimp and seafood imported from China to be detained at the port for testing before being passed.

However, this regulation does not make Chinese seafood safer in the US when businesses have different ways to evade authorities, as they did with steel. Accordingly, these companies move seafood products to many countries to remove origin and import into the US, a sophisticated system that experts say is no different from criminal gangs who are laundering money.

Government helpless

The Beijing government has also recognized the use of innocent antibiotics in farms and since 2011, China has implemented programs to limit the use of antibiotics in health care. Since then, the rate of antibiotic use in some places like Shanghai has decreased by 31% and has recently proposed to ban the use of Colistin in animal husbandry in China.

However, the situation has become too serious when China is the country with the highest rate of antibiotic resistance in the world. A nationwide survey showed that 42-83% of the healthy people tested contained a virus that is resistant to penicillin and its variants.

Meanwhile, a market survey in Shanghai shows that most seafood products in the market contain bacteria that cannot be killed by conventional antibiotics. A study that lasted between 2006-2011 collected data from Thuong Hai and concluded that one-third of the seafood contained Sa, monella, a bacterium that causes gastritis in humans and a dangerous 43. % of bacterial samples found in Shanghai have strong resistance to drugs.

Previously, many experts believed that the spread of these viruses was mainly through travel and transportation when foreigners consumed food and drugs in other countries. Although doubts about Chinese food are the main reason instead of early tourism, there is no concrete scientific evidence to prove it until 2015.

Shops selling antibiotics have a lot in China with very poor quality testing.

At that time, a study by NML-Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory showed that all samples positive for virus from seafood products came from Southeast Asia and China.

Since the 1990s, the annual US shrimp consumption has doubled and become a mainstream food. In the 1980s, most American shrimp were cultivated domestically, but this situation had to change when demand increased too strong.

Between 1990 and 2006, the amount of shrimp imported into the United States doubled, reaching about 0.6 million tons per year today and about 90% of the shrimp on the American table are now grown from abroad.

In 2003, the proportion of shrimp imported from China to the US reached a record level in the previous 11 years with 16% of the market share and by 2004, the US Department of Commerce had to impose 112% anti-dumping duty on products. this.

A system is no different from money laundering

In response to US trade barriers to food, Chinese businesses have built a sophisticated system to eliminate the origin of frozen seafood exports.

According to US government statistics, the amount of shrimp imports from Malaysia in 2004 unexpectedly increased 10 times after the US began to impose anti-dumping duties on shrimp from China. This volume of imported shrimp increased steadily and accounted for 5% of the shrimp market in the US in 2008-2011.

Many US officials now believe that a large amount of shrimp imported from Malaysia is actually from China because it produces shrimp depending on the season. In 2015, the country only produced 32,000 tons of shrimp and about 18,000 tons were consumed domestically, 12,000 tons were exported to Singapore, so the rest was not enough to dominate other markets.

An interesting coincidence is that the amount of imported seafood from China to Malaysia has increased dramatically in the past 10 years with an average of 20,000 tons / year.

In 2011, 75% of shrimp containing banned substances were imported from China into the US, only 6% came from Malaysia.However, in 2015, 77% of banned shrimp imported into the US were from Malaysia.

According to US authorities, shipping shrimp from China to Malaysia and exchanging origin papers is extremely normal when brokers can complete paperwork easily.

Last April, the FDA had to warn that it would be possible to arrest and inspect all shipments of shrimp and seafood from Malaysia and some countries to conduct tests before any concerns about counterfeiting and originating papers. of these items. In response, the Malaysian Ministry of Health pledged to tighten control of shrimp processing factories as well as the authority to issue certificates of origin from the chamber of commerce.

Not only that, frozen seafood products are also exported to many countries by Chinese enterprises before being exported to the US to avoid the investigation of customs officials when Malaysia is suspected. One of the countries targeted by China today is Ecuador when the amount of shrimp imported from China here to enter the US has started to increase.

Obviously, the profits of the seafood industry make Chinese enterprises not from any tricks to smuggle dirty food from their countries to other markets. Although the authorities of many countries have tried but Chinese shrimp and seafood dishes to help bring consumers from the table to the cemetery faster still appear rampant in the market.