By Guy Newey
Beijing - Industrial oils, acid, cancer-causing chemicals and other dangerous ingredients have been found in thousands of foods in China, inspectors said on Wednesday following a six-month crackdown.
The nationwide investigation by China's food quality watchdog found products such as baby milk powder, rice, flour, meat, biscuits, seafood, soy sauce and sweets had been contaminated.
More than 23 000 tainted or sub-standard foods were found and 180 food manufacturers closed in the crackdown from December last year to May, said the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
Some of the industrial products found in foods included formaldehyde, a chemical more famously used to embalm people, and hydrochloric acid, which was found in some beef products.
Other materials detected included industrial paraffin, which was found in vermicelli, and the dye malachite green, which can be carcinogenic, according to the watchdog's statement published on its website.
"These are not isolated cases," the China Daily newspaper quoted Han Yi, a director with the watchdog, as saying.
The watchdog's probe focused mainly on China's countryside and Han said investigators now intended to turn their attention to cities.
The announcement of the investigation's findings come as China faces unprecedented international scrutiny over the quality of its food exports and other goods that have caused harm to buyers overseas.
Reports in the United States of tainted pet foods, dangerous toys, drugs, fish, cosmetics and other products from China have led to a spate of recalls and bans there.
About 75 percent of China's one million food-processing plants are small operations, according to the quality watchdog.
Han said most of the contaminated foods did indeed come from small, unlicensed food processing plants that employed fewer than 10 people.
Beijing-based writer and dissident Zhou Qing, who wrote a book on China's food industry, said the poor standards were a result of small scale production combined with endemic corruption.
"It is hard to control and prevent because there are many small food processing workshop with chaotic operations," Zhou told AFP.
"Tainted food is a very serious problem in China. Different levels of government authorities are used to covering up and telling lies when food safety problem arise. Therefore, counterfeit food is everywhere in China."
Corruption and small-scale enterprise plague many other parts of Chinese society.
One of the most recent scandals was widespread slavery in small brickyards in two Chinese provinces. Local officials are widely believed to have helped protect the slave trade.
Meanwhile, thousands of people die each year in small and illegal coal mines around the country that similarly operate with the collusion of corrupt local officials. - Sapa-AFP