Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain

Paul Pennay | Sep 28, 2008 11:20 am | 7 comments | 2388 reads

Beijing’s milk suppliers have been hard hit by the melamine milk scandal that has rocked the country these past few weeks. Production in Yanqing County’s Dabai Village, one of the largest dairy-farm-reliant villages in Beijing, has come to a halt. The local government has agreed to compensate dairy farmers for their loss and has set up centralized milk stations to take charge of disposing of any affected milk. Earlier this week, dozens of tankers filled with milk arrived at a farm in Yanqing County to pour thousands of liters of milk into a reservoir. Much of the milk was from suppliers who had been sourcing many of the now suspect brand-name companies.

Links and Sources
The Beijing News: 京郊奶牛第一村倒奶背后
Bloomberg: China Milk Scandal Exposes `Failure' in Food-Sourcing System
Taipei Times: Carrefour dairy sales halved after milk scare
Xinhua: Chinese gov't: no melamine detected in 296 tests in last fortnight
Xinhua: China subsidizes loans to support dairy production

Comments

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Re: Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain
Posted Oct 3, 2008 3:47pm by lioralourie

Green Yard organic milk is safe.

Certified organic, and they also had the requisite testing done (4 inspectors at their plant). I saw their certificates.

http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/listings/shopping/supermarkets/has/green-yard-organic-milk-and-yogurt/

Liora Pearlman
Moderator, Beiing Mamas and Beijing Organic Consumers' Association (BOCA) yahoo groups
groups.yahoo.com/group/Beijing_Mamas

Re: Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain
Posted Sep 29, 2008 10:45pm by cowboy123

I doubt most of the farmers would be sophisticated enough to do this.

Re: Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain
Posted Sep 29, 2008 3:10pm by hksearching

The Hong Kong government says it's liaising with the Indonesian authorities, who've found the industrial chemical melamine in at least nine types of chocolate and biscuits produced on the mainland. These include M-and-Ms, Snickers and Oreos. The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department says Hong Kong will conduct its own tests to determine whether the same products sold locally contain melamine.

http://www.rthk.org.hk/rthk/news/englishnews/news.htm?main&20080929&56&526530

I have a hard time blaming the farmers who are the poorest of all, at the bottom of the pyramid and mostly uneducated and unable to obtain good information about the products they were putting into their milk. They may have been led to believe that they weren't harmful and without access to an open press and information to the contrary, why would they doubt or question?

Re: Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain
Posted Sep 29, 2008 1:13pm by Daniel_bj

poor famers!
most of people believe that the dairy famers or some of the dairy famers added melamine to their milk.
can you imagine?if you were the manager of dairy fatory,have you never checked the milk quality what were used to be your products?
please remenber you are professional,the famers are nothing.
who deos your fatory belong to?
which department were your products checked by?

Re: Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain
Posted Sep 28, 2008 2:08pm by Paulus

Yes - the image is indeed of milk being poured into a reservoir - was taken by a photographer with the Beijing News. Most articles about the milk scandal tend to lay the blame for the contamination at the feet of the "milk stations" that served as middle men between the primary producers and the big producers - see Bloomberg link above.

Re: Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain
Posted Sep 28, 2008 12:54pm by Jerry

Yeah - no doubt some of the very same dairy farmers are guilty, but probably not all. It's always the bad apples that ruin the bunch.

But it would definitely be interesting to see on what grounds and what criteria the government is basing its compensation decisions on...

Jerry Chan, Digital Marketing & Content Strategy Director

Re: Milk Update: Beijing Pours its Milk Down the Drain
Posted Sep 28, 2008 12:38pm by admin

"The local government has agreed to compensate dairy farmers for their loss"

-- aren't the dairy farmers themselves the ones that have been adding melamine to their milk supplies to cover up their watering down of their product?

And is that really a picture of trucks pouring milk into a reservoir?

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