ARTICLE: “Tainted Ginger’s Long Trip From China to U.S. Stores: Supply Chains Make Finding Source Tough; Lots of Small Farms,” by Nicholas Zamiska and David Kesmodel, Wall Street Journal, 19 November 2007, p. A1.
Fascinating story. America gets over half its ginger from China.
Want to guarantee its safety?
Boy, are you ever going to travel up into the heart of supply chain darkness.
One industry consultant says, “You can’t just throw the [orders] over the Great Wall and hope it comes back good.”
So what’s going to happen?
ARTICLE: “China Agrees to Post U.S. Safety Officials in its Food Factories,” by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 12 December 2007, p. C3.ARTICLE: “Agreement With China To Regulate Some Drugs,” by Jake Hooker and Walt Bogdanovich, New York Times, 12 December 2007, p. C3.
How many inspectors needed? There will never be enough.
Enterra would argue that you want to flood this system with sensors, attaching them and even embedding them (nano-wise) inside the resulting products, and making the whole system transparent from stem to stern. Complex? Yes. But that’s where the dynamic management of rules comes in. Easy to get the sensor to go off. Harder to answer the question, “What do we do now?” Especially when the “we” may encompass a vast cast of characters spread across industries, countries, and governments—even continents.
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Comments (6)
I would argue that the need is for rule sets, not sensors. USDA Food Safety & Inspection Service should also be at this table (pardon the pun), since they watch the other half of our farm-to-table arc. They have been transitioning from organoleptic sensors (e.g. inspectors looking and sniffing) to a scientifically based Hazard Analysis and Critical Contol Points system. That's a good rule set to export to China.
Posted by TEJ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/nav-commenters.gif)
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December 20, 2007 8:43 AM
I've been arguing for some time that FDR had the original "Blueprint for Action" - the creation of an institutional framework at the end of WWII that could make globalization work, including the economic component (Bretton Woods, leading to the IMF, World Bank, and WTO), the security component (the UN), and the human rights component (the Nuremberg Accords, which are the basis for the ICC). It was really amazingly far-sighted when this all happened in the 1940's, but it's time for an update. I'd love to hear one of our Presidential candidates say that what is needed is a comprehensive effort to update these institutions to deal with the realities of today's globalization. Instead we just get outdated Left/Right nostrums arguing for protectionism at one extreme, and at the other extreme, the assumption that free trade necessarily means unregulated trade.
Posted by stuart abrams | December 20, 2007 11:51 AM
Lady of tdaxp (whose graduate work is on RFID remote sensing tags) and I had the pleasure of eating dinner with an importer/exporter the other week. He was describing how he got into the business, and one of the hard lessons he has learned is that Guangdong factories are just not up to western standards -- he was finding that he had to send people over to those locations and set rules for the processes to a much greater extent than he was used to. I mentioned the importance of "knowing your supply chain" and a few related phrases, and his reaction was: "yes, absolutely right. Absolutely right."
Posted by dan tdaxp | December 20, 2007 3:11 PM
Count me as another who would suggest RFID rather than nanotech sensors to address this issue. Those little pieces of paper with the squiggly metal loops on them that you find in the pockets of new clothes or books cost about a nickel a piece (or at least they did the last time I was looking at this stuff). There are enough unique numbers in the RFID address space to label every atom in the Milky Way. That ought to be enough to keep track of the individual lots of ginger all the way back to the farmer who grew it and all the processors along the way.
Wall-Mart requires suppliers to tag their stuff with RFID. Soon everybody who deals with China will probably do the same thing.
Posted by Mark in Texas | December 20, 2007 10:14 PM
Stuart,
I am reading that book this weekend.
Posted by Tom Barnett | December 21, 2007 7:26 AM
I agree with TEJ. While biosensors and RFID should be deployed, transparent rulesets like HACCP and ISO should be the basis of operation for bulk commodities. China is learning, the last two ISO survey's demonstrate China's the fastest growing region for QMS certification (US is 5th, but first in ISO 14000 certs).
Beyond a prescriptive QMS approach (ISO), a descriptive one (6sigma) should be deployed as well. Working with both, they go well together.
Posted by Chad | December 21, 2007 9:26 AM