Rick Scott reignites his battle towards ‘Chinese sewage garlic.’ Is it really a ‘major threat?’ | EUROtoday

Senator Rick Scott of Florida is pushing to crack down on imports of Chinese garlic, claiming it poses a “major threat” to safety and security as a result of it could be grown in human sewage and harvested with slave and baby labor.

Scott, a Republican, despatched a collection of letters to U.S. commerce, labor, and agriculture businesses on Monday calling for Chinese garlic to be investigated and placed on U.S. commerce watchlists, saying that claims of sewer garlic, if verified, would pose a “significant ethical and legal issue” to the U.S. provide chain.

“Communist China has a clear and disturbing history of failing to meet basic standards of food safety and transparency, as well as a well-documented record of using slave labor in its supply chains, which raises red flags about the labor practices and safety of its agricultural products, particularly garlic,” Scott wrote in a single letter to the Department of Agriculture.

The Senator is asking that Chinese garlic be placed on the Bureau of International Labor Affairs’ List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor and be investigated below Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

The Independent has contacted the Chinese embassy in Washington for remark.

The Senator has lengthy accused Chinese garlic of being tainted.

“Reports indicate that Chinese garlic is grown using raw sewage, possibly including human feces, and that the garlic is then bleached to make it appear whiter and cleaner to the eye after its growth in unsanitary conditions,” he stated in a January video. “It’s also processed using slave labor. Communist Chinese uses slave labor. And these poor people are forced to peel so much garlic that their fingernails — fingernails — literally fall off so they have to use their teeth to get the job done. It’s horrific. And it means that Chinese sewage, garlic should be unacceptable for human conception.”

In December of 2023, Scott requested the Commerce Department to analyze Chinese garlic and for U.S. grocery shops to cease promoting it, whereas in January he launched a invoice to ban garlic imported garlic from China. He’s additionally pushed to ban the sale of Chinese garlic in U.S. navy commissaries and the usage of the produce in navy eating halls.

As proof for his claims, Scott has pointed to the Netflix documentary collection Rottenwhich options an episode accusing Christopher Ranch, a significant U.S. garlic producer, of being concerned in price-fixing and utilizing garlic peeled by Chinese prisoners. The episode options what producers say is hidden digital camera footage of prisoners peeling garlic for the corporate.

“They claim forced labor went into that label,” firm official Ken Christopher advised KION in 2018. “It was packed specifically for us, and we have no trademarks in China. So that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

He added a lot of the firm’s roughly 90 million kilos of garlic manufacturing is grown and processed in California, and that the roughly 10 p.c of its product that’s imported isn’t processed in jail. He stated the undercover video was pretend.

Zero Point Zero, which produced Rottenhas stated it stands by its reporting.

“There is no evidence that garlic in China is fertilized in this fashion,” McGill University’s Office for Science and Society program wrote in a 2017 article on allegations of Chinese sewer garlic.

China is the world’s largest exporter of garlic, and the U.S. has tariffed Chinese exports of garlic because the mid-Nineties to guard U.S. producers, tariffs the Trump administration elevated in 2019. China is the most important provider of garlic to the U.S., in keeping with the Department of Agriculture.

The incoming Trump administration has signaled it’ll search to boost tariffs on quite a lot of Chinese items.