Morinaga Milk Industry,A major Japanese food manufacturer has found traces of an industrial chemical in some of its products that were made in China, as a food safety scare centered on tainted milk continued to spread, health officials said Friday.
The news came as Japan added food products from 12 Asian countries and territories with a record of importing milk products from China to a watch list for special inspections.
Japan’s Marudai Food Co pulled its cream buns, meat buns and creamed corn crepes from supermarkets a week ago as the tainted milk scandal in China began to unfold. Its tests have since found traces of the industrial chemical melamine in several of the recalled products, Health and Welfare Ministry official Mina Kojima said.
Japan's third largest dairy company posted [yen] 431.2bn in sales for its 1999 financial year, ending March 1999, for a net profit of [yen] 2.5bn and a current profit of [yen] 8.7bn, up compared with sales of [yen] 418.2bn in 1998, for a [yen] 2.5bn net profit and a current profit of [yen] 7.5bn. Morinaga Milk's main business is dairy products; it posted [yen] 193bn, it holds a 8% share of market milk and which represented 45% of the sales in dairy product business. Sales of condensed milk, dried milk, cheese and butter, represented 20% of the sales, for [yen] 84.8bn. Morinaga Milk ranks second on the yogurt market with a 19% market share ; its sales came to [yen] 55bn in 1998. It also ranks second on the ice cream market, posting sales of [yen] 51.3bn, up 4%. Morinaga Milk leads the coffee creamer market; it sold 7.350 tonnes of its Creap brand which holds a 34% market share. In 1998, Morinaga Milk sold [yen] 520mn worth of baby food for a 2.5% market share, and it ranks third on the infant milk market, where it holds a 26% market share, for a sales volume of 9,000 tonnes. In addition to dairy products, Morinaga is involved in soft drinks, chilled foods, fertilisers, effluent treatment plants, coffee creamer, infant foods, tofu, dairy engineering, farming, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, cosmetics, and real estate. It exports tofu to 32 countries, and sells tofu with a long shelf life in the United States. Morinaga milk's soft drink sales came to [yen] 33.8bn in 1998, representing 8% of sales. Morinaga milk spent [yen] 10bn biotechnology research laboratory which is to produce drugs for cancer from bifidus bacteria, and to develop other drugs designed to counteract side effects of cancer
Marudai has sold more than 300,000 of the products, most of which are believed to have been consumed, but so far there have been no reports of health problems, she said.
Company executive Masaaki Sugiyama told a news conference that two kinds of cream buns and the crepes had traces of melamine, but the amount was so small that it posed no health threat. He apologized for the company’s failure to prevent the contamination.
The public health department in Takatsuki, a western city where Marudai is headquartered, said its lab tests found one of the cream buns, “Cream Panda,” contained melamine 74 times higher than the tolerable daily intake level set by the European Food Safety Agency.
But public health official Mami Matsumoto said an average adult would need to eat 33 crepes or 17 panda buns every day to risk being sickened.
“Nobody eats so many of them. We believe the risk is negligible,” Matsumoto said.
The ministry said earlier Friday that it had suspended imports of milk and milk products from China, and had singled out products from 12 other countries and territories for close inspection. The move was meant to prevent tainted products from entering the country, ministry official Yoshiya Nishimura said. This study has three main objectives: (i) to quantify the impacts of milk and feed price changes on the primary milk supply in the U.S.;Many of the more than 60,000 dairy farms in the United States have been cutting costs, selling off their cows, or leaving the dairy business altogether as milk prices plummet 35 percent in just the past two months while dairy farm operating costs remain uncomfortably high.
Some farms are losing $200 per head every month.
"We've dealt with 18 percent interest. We've dealt with farm recession. We've dealt with droughts and floods and this is by far the worst economic situation we have ever dealt with in our years of farming," said Kooistra, who has run Kooistra Farms in Woodstock, Illinois, with her husband since 1980.
(ii) to examine the impacts of technological changes on the price responsiveness of supply and specific herd characteristics; and (iii) to generate dynamic long-run forecasts of the milk supply response to price changes and possible future technological advancements. The econometric analysis contained in this study is an update of the model by Chavas and Klemme (1986). We used the residual-based bootstrap to test hypotheses regarding the long-run price-responsiveness of supply, and found that the 10-year elasticity of milk supply to milk price is lower in 2007 than it was in 1980. This result is most surprising. One might expect that with better genetics, improved heifer management and larger farms the industry would be likely to react to prices more quickly than almost thirty years ago, when small and medium-sized dairy operations played a major role. A detailed analysis of the predicted herd structure supports the conjecture that a decrease in priceRight now, the price of milk will barely cover our feed costs and to pay our veterinarian. I'm not even counting all the other expenses that go along with keeping a farm running, the utilities, the fuel costs," she said.
"Given the suddenness and severity of the plunge in farm-level milk prices, a significant number of farmers won't survive the winter," Jerry Kozak, president and chief executive of National Milk Producers Federation, said last month.
Farmers have an opportunity to get paid for culling their herds via the farmer-funded CWT program, which was in the process of securing a line of credit to augment its efforts in 2009, according to NMPF's Kozak.
Industry analysts say the reason for the steep drop in milk prices is simple-- too much milk and not enough demand for it. Restaurant traffic is down in the United States as recession jitters have consumers reeling in their spending. About 40 percent of U.S. milk production is made into cheese and roughly 60 percent of the cheese is used in the restaurant and food-service sectors, according to analysts.
Dairy exports, which helped drive U.S. milk prices to the sky-high levels in 2007 and 2008, are also down sharply.
Meanwhile, New Zealand and Australia, two top global suppliers, are exporting more milk products after severe drought slashed production in the past few years.
The European Union has reinstated export subsidies on a range of dairy products, essentially pricing U.S. supplies out of the market.
"Even in the good times, you're always looking at ways to manage better and keep the costs down. When these extremes come along, it's pretty hard to find anything else to cut," said dairy farmer Brad Scott, of Scott Brothers Dairy Farm in San Jacinto, California.
"In a factory, when things get bad you can always just turn the key off and wait until things improve. In a dairy there's no key to turn off." responsiveness is a consequence of decades-long excessive focus on yield improvement in genetic selection. The intensive production process could make cows susceptible to health problems, imposing biological constraints on the economic lifetime of a cow. Hence, herd expansion decisions will be harder to implement, as culling rates are not easily reduced, and more replacement heifers are needed just to keep the herd size stable.
