By CHRIS BRUMMITT, Associated Press – 3 days ago
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Jack Nguyen had sold 20 of his 30 containers of imported American grapes when fresh rumors hit the Internet and state-run media: Chinese fruit on sale in Vietnam might look good, but it contains deadly levels of preservatives and pesticides. Shoppers quickly stopped buying imported fruit altogether, believing it all tainted or falsely labeled. The last 10 containers rotted.
While fears about the safety of Chinese food products are often well founded, in Vietnam they are so tangled up with anti-Chinese sentiment it is hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. More than 1,000 years of occupation, a bloody border war in 1979 and renewed assertiveness by China in pushing territorial claims in the South China Sea mean that tales of Chinese perfidy find fertile soil in which to grow.
Vietnam’s authoritarian government tries to stop direct criticism of China, or discussion of its relationship with Beijing, because it is vulnerable to charges by nationalists and democracy activists that it lacks the guts to stand up to its fellow Communist country. As a result, anger at its giant northern neighbor China is increasingly showing up in consumer behavior.
Nguyen says sales at his firm, one of the largest fruit importers in the country, were down to $6 million last year from $11 million in 2011. While he and others in the trade say Vietnam’s economic slowdown is partly to blame, he complains the constant media reports of toxic fruit are strangling businesses, even for those like him who no longer import from China.
“It’s all about how they can sell more newspapers. Nowadays if you write an article about Chinese products, you immediately get millions of hits online,” he said by phone from Australia, where he was buying up part of that country’s grape harvest. “We lost a lot of money just because someone was writing something fancy.”
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/amid-tensions-chinese-fruit-turnoff-vietnam-071816194–finance.html
