For every food exporter looking to access the American market, there is a huge mega-importer looking for the lowest price.

"Some place like Wal-Mart is constantly squeezing the firms to reduce costs. At some point you can't internalize the costs of compliance with safety criteria," Suppan said. "With food you have a different challenge, especially if it's a processed food where you have ingredients coming from a lot of different places in the country. If you don't have what they call a 'chain of custody' and you can't maintain the cold chain to ensure there's not a chance for contaminants or pathogens to forge, then you have a big-time problem."

The United States has huge, highly centralized plants and processing centers that churn out mass quantities of meat or other food products quickly and efficiently. That keeps costs down, but a problem at one of these plants can quickly affect a huge number of products and portion of the American diet. The United States has its own problems with food safety through these plants, as evidenced by an outbreak last year of E. coli in bagged fresh spinach that affected multiple U.S. states and brands.

Importers may push Chinese farmers and food processors to adopt U.S.-style production to keep costs low, but it comes at a price.

"As long as we are pushing for the lowest price all the time, driving our supply chain, you get more efficient. But at a certain point there is no more efficiency and you sacrifice quality," Nancy M. Childs, professor of food marketing at St. Joseph University in Philadelphia, told The New York Times.

In the United States, lobbyists for mega food importers have successfully blocked initiatives such as country-of-origin labeling for food, raising doubts that more stringent food controls on imports will be adopted, Suppan said.

"These lobbyists are extremely well-funded, and their presence in Congress is continuous. A lot of the lobbyists are former members of Congress," he added.

These ex-politicians have open access to government officials, so concerns about food safety are not likely to be resolved with real change.

What about the WTO?

However, even if the U.S. Government is hamstrung by lobbyists and Chinese producers are crippled by pressure to cut costs, other trade regulators such as the World Trade Organization should be able to ensure food trade is safe.

"There are a couple sides to this equation," Suppan said. "One concerns what should be bilateral sanitary equivalency agreements, which is what the World Trade Organization requires and what presumably the U.S. and China negotiated as a condition of Chinese accession to the WTO."

Under these bilateral agreements, countries pledge to accept different measures that provide the same level of protection for food, animals and plants, according to the WTO.

"There was obviously either a cursory investigation by the U.S. of China's food safety controls, or there was something more extensive and there are processing establishments that are not qualified that have put a product into the system for export," Suppan said.

WTO equivalency agreements require countries to pass more stringent documentation requirements and inspections on products they have less experience in exporting, he said. In China's case, if onsite visits did not happen before, then presumably they will happen now, Suppan added. That means a lot of extra expense for Chinese farmers, who will have to pass the costs on to consumers.

"The simple closing of a lot of small feed mills and small processing establishments, which apparently is how the Chinese Government is responding, doesn't in itself fix the problem," he said. "The real issue is: Are there certified export establishments?"

The WTO department in charge of overseeing food safety has received calls to extend special treatment to developing countries in their compliance efforts.

"I can assure you, that besides small developing countries getting more technical assistance and perhaps some more infrastructure for FPS laboratories, that there will be no special treatment," he said.

(Reporting from New York)