Schumer: ‘Honey laundering’ a sticky problem that needs FDA intervention

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) this week wrote to Food and Drug
Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to request that the FDA
create “pure honey” standards that would give federal agents more
power to crack down on adulteration, misbranding and fraudulent
mislabeling of honey.

The letter came two days before the FDA announced that it
seized at a Philadelphia distribution center 64 drums, worth
$32,000, of imported Chinese honey that was contaminated with the
potent antibiotic chloramphenicol.

{mosads}”This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to honey
laundering,” Schumer said in a statement Friday. “We urge the FDA to do a
large-scale sweep of similar shipments from China because we are sure
they will find many more illegal batches of smuggled honey.”

Schumer also said he’s working with the U.S. honey industry on a bill
that would crack down on ‘honey laundering’ through other countries by
making it harder to set up shell corporations and providing more
resources for the FDA.

New York is the nation’s 12th largest producer of honey, with $5.3
million is sales last year, but there are concerns that tainted honey
from China could hurt demand. Chinese beekeepers sometimes use
chloramphenicol to fight off certain bee diseases, but the antibiotic
is not approved for use in food, animal feed or food-producing animals
in the United States.

Schumer said a federal standard for pure honey would be more efficient
than the patchwork of state standards in place today.