The recent financial troubles in Wall Street and across the wider globe should have at least reminded us of one thing. Where there is a lot of money flying around, and a weakness in regulation, greed will prosper and corruption will not be far behind. Like it or not, that is the way that we appear to be hard-wired as a species. Effective risk and quality management should never ignore these factors.

Certain things shouldn’t happen, true enough, but if they can happen they will do In risk management terms we must assume that anything that can happen, sooner or later, will. The only question worth asking is whether the risk is worth managing, or whether we are prepared to accept the risk and live with the consequences The recent problems concerning the contamination of baby milk, and confectionery with the harmful chemical melamine, demonstrate the potential consequences of poor management of risk.

But let’s not dress this up as anything it is not. This is not a case where incompetence, weak process control or contaminated materials have allowed out of specification product to be inadvertently produced and shipped. In each of these cases it was a deliberate act by the manufacturer concerned. The melamine was supposed to be there, the products were designed to be poisonous. The consequences for the consumer being of secondary importance to the manipulation of test results to show a higher than actual protein content (something that melamine does), and therefore to command a higher sale price So what lessons can be learned from these recent events?

Well, if nothing else, that there is no such thing in life as a free lunch. The low cost of Chinese produced goods has been attractive to many western firms over the past half decade or so, but we do need to proceed with our eyes wide open. Certain risks are increased and, let’s face it, if children’s sweets and baby milk are not off-limits for dangerous and fraudulent activity, nothing is. Melamine even poisons primates

The European Commission has “acted swiftly” to suspend the import of all Chinese baby food that contains traces of milk to the EU. Given China’s recent record it beggars belief that anyone would contemplate importing baby milk from that location just now under almost any circumstances Everything comes at a cost, and with low production costs often that means corners are cut.

incredible

www.capablepeople.co.uk

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Occupational Health & Safety, Quality Improvement, Risk & Assurance.
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