Mercury Rising: Food Scandal Disappears From Internet

Talk of China’s most recent milk scandal has been quashed on the country’s Internet, highlighting the key role that food safety plays in maintaining social stability in the world’s most populous country.

In the days after Chinese dairy company Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co. announced a recall of infant formula products found to contain the chemical element mercury, discussion on China’s web has been limited, particularly on China’s popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, where searches for the Chinese terms of “Yili infant powder” have been blocked.

Some posts using two different Chinese terms for mercury and the phrase food safety have been deleted, according to a database of deleted Sina Weibo posts maintained by the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center.

Sina Weibo and Yili spokesmen could not be reached for comment Monday.

China’s media watchers say that suppressing talk about the newest problems with Yili’s milk powder is an attempt to maintain control of social stability in China, where public fears over food safety have been fed by a steady stream of news in the local press about consumers who have fallen ill by eating tainted pork or drinking poisoned milk.

The government faces severe challenges in improving food safety despite launching a series of campaigns since 2008, when six babies died and 300,000 others were poisoned by milk tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Yili was among 22 milk producers involved that scandal.

Officials suppressed online discussion and media coverage of the 2008 scandal, according to Jeremy Goldkorn, director of Danwei.com, which researches Chinese media and Internet. “This is one of the major hot button issues on the Internet,” said Mr. Goldkorn, adding: “It’s a topic that matters to everyone; no one wants to give children poisonous food.”

Dairy industry insiders say that the Chinese government has also been eager to preserve the country’s dairy industry, which is booming, offering China significant growth as leaders push the rise of a domestic companies and domestic consumption.

The country’s overall dairy sales reached $28 billion last year, up 8.5% from a year earlier, according to research firm Euromonitor International.

The mercury in Yili’s Quanyou-brand infant formulas manufactured from November to last month is most likely related to chemical contamination coming through feed or water, dairy industry experts say. Yili’s dairy farms in Inner Mongolia straddle lands that have in recent years been exploited by mining companies digging for coal and rare earth minerals used in high-technology products.

Contaminated whey powder, which is used heavily in infant formula, is also a possible source of contamination, said David Mahon, managing director of Mahon China Investment Management, a Beijing-based investment firm focused on Chinese agriculture.

Exposure to mercury can permanently damage vital organs, including the kidneys and the brain, causing tremors, memory problems and changes of vision and hearing, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also states that young children are more sensitive to mercury than adults.

China’s domestic dairy industry still faces consumer scrutiny but has made steps toward recovery since the 2008 scandal. Yili’s profits nearly doubled in 2011, reaching 1.8 billion yuan ($283 million) on sales of 37.45 billion yuan, up 25% from a year earlier. In China’s infant formula market, Yili had the fourth-largest market share, with 7.9%, in 2010, according to the most recent data available from Euromonitor International.

Not all online chatter about the topic has been restricted. Pictures of people loading up on foreign-made, non-Mainland infant formula are circulating on Weibo.

On Babytree.com, a Chinese discussion board and e-commerce site for new mothers, the news is just beginning to spread. “I haven’t heard anything about this,” said one mother with an 11-month infant. “It seems now giving my baby any kind of infant formula just makes me worry,” she said.

– Laurie Burkitt. Follow her on Twitter @lburkitt

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