Michael Tan: Pinoy Kasi

Pinoy Kasi: the UNOFFICIAL website of anthropologist Michael Tan's Philippine Daily Inquirer opinion column. For more information, visit his official web site at: http://pinoykasi.homestead.com/

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Sunday, August 05, 2007

Good food

PINOY KASI

Good food
By Michael Tan

Inquirer
Last updated 01:40am (Mla time) 07/04/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- The squeeze continues on Chinese exports, this time with the United States imposing stricter guidelines on the entry of five types of farm-raised seafood because of fear of contamination from unapproved drugs and food additives.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an “import alert” last week on shrimp, catfish, eel, basa (a fish similar to catfish) and dace. Under the import alert, importers must provide independent testing to prove the seafood does not contain contaminants. The FDA said they took action after years of warnings and visits to Chinese fishponds showed no signs of improvement.

I suspect the US government has other political reasons behind the all these restrictions, but this does not mean we should be taking the US moves for granted. There are very real issues of safety, especially for food, that need to be confronted. With our close trading ties with China, we should also be looking at what they export to us. I’ve already written several columns about this, including one just last Friday about the growing list of countries taking action against Chinese products, from toothpaste to car tires.

The latest US restriction, however, brings up still another issue, specifically around food. Just what is it that makes us want to keep importing food, and what should we be doing, for the long term, to cut down on this dependence?

'De lata'

After my column came out last Friday, I got feedback from different people, mainly expressing concern that our government might be too lax about imported items. Over the weekend, I read that our Bureau of Food and Drugs (BFAD) was checking out reports about the Chinese government closing down 180 food manufacturers using formaldehyde and other contaminants.

A BFAD official pointed out that we are not even sure if these products are exported. I agree, but that doesn’t mean we should let our guard down. It would be useful for the BFAD to check with the FDA’s database of banned imports. According to The New York Times, in May alone, the United States turned away 165 shipments from China, including monkfish that was “filthy and unfit to be eaten,” frozen catfish nuggets with animal drugs and tilapia contaminated with salmonella (a kind of bacteria). In April, 257 shipments were rejected, including 68 involving seafood. That included frozen eel with pesticides, catfish with salmonella again and “filthy” frozen yellowfin tuna steaks.

Our desire for imported foods dates way back to, or maybe even before, the colonial period, when we began to equate “good” food with imported products. Under the Americans, “good” food meant processed foods, with the wonders of food processing dazzling Filipinos as a sign of modernity. To this day, many Filipinos still crave imported canned foods like "carne norte" (corned beef, christened as meat from the north) or Spam (which always shocks Americans, because the food has a totally different class connotation in the United States).

Christmas was a time when the imported foods were at an even greater premium: apples and oranges and "keso de bola" (cheese). Today, it doesn’t have to be Christmas before one finds these imported items. With import liberalization, we have opened our doors to all kinds of products, from Thai fish sauce ("patis") to dried apricots from Turkey and fruit juices from South Africa.

The variety can be enticing, especially with the aura of exoticism attached to these foods, but we forget that together with the exotic qualities, we might want to know more about the imports: Where were they planted? How much pesticides were used? What preservatives and additives were used? Have the foods expired? Did the foods go through our regulatory boards, or were they smuggled in?

Another issue is the impact of these imports on local agriculture. We are flooded with Chinese fruits, many cheaper than local ones. Instead of supporting our farmers with better roads so they can get their fruits quickly and more efficiently into the markets, we’ve allowed the imports to come in with no limits. The results can be disastrous: We’ve seen how cheap vegetables from Australia have practically killed our own vegetable industry in La Trinidad, Benguet, with many farmers now shifting to cut flowers.

If you like some of the imported fruits, vegetables and herbs, find ways to grow them here. Recently a neighbor gave us luscious longan, a Chinese fruit, grown from seeds of imported fruits that they had bought locally. Last weekend, too, I found some mouth-watering canistels being sold in the Lung Center Sunday market. Canistel? That’s the English name for "tiesa." The ones being sold in the Sunday market were big and sweet, foreign varieties but grown locally. I’m open to that kind of experimentation, so long as local varieties are not displaced.

Safety

Let me deal now with the recent US Food and Drug Administration’s import alert. The issue here is the way Chinese farmers have been raising fish and shrimp. These are farmed in ponds in large numbers, which make them prone to disease. To prevent the disease outbreaks, the farmers use antifungals and antibacterials that are banned by the United States. These include nitrofurans, malachite green and gentian violet, long-term exposure to which have been correlated with cancer in laboratory animals. The Chinese farmers also use fluoroquinolone antibiotics, which the US government bans for aquaculture because of fears this will bring about antibiotic resistance in the future.

The new FDA directive alerts us to the growing fears in developed countries of the links between bad livestock and aquaculture practices and public health. In the Philippines, we have to worry not just about Chinese imports but also about local products and contamination by hormones, steroids and other drugs. There are laws regulating the use of these pharmaceuticals and other food additives, but implementation is not easy.

As in agriculture, there is a tiny but growing organic movement with livestock raisers. You can find products now like free-roaming chickens, meaning poultry allowed to roam freely rather than being kept in cages and fed hormones and antibiotics. There are also eggs from free-roaming chickens. These products are still very expensive because of economies of scale, but maybe in the future, with a greater demand for them, we will see prices coming down.

That’s going to take time, since we still need to re-educate ourselves and our taste buds to redefine good food as fresh food, preferably grown locally and organically. Sometimes, I wonder if that will ever happen, given the barrage of mass media messages pushing the imported, processed foods and the lack of government support for small farmers who want to go organic with agriculture and livestock.

If you’re wondering, yes, native chickens have always been free-roaming.

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