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Published: December 2008

Outdated safety protections expose kids to unsafe toys

Public Citizen has released a study detailing how failures in U.S. trade policy and consumer protections continue to expose the country's children to a flood of toxic and unsafe toys.

Download a copy of Public Citizen's report - 'Closing Santa's Sweatshop'

Below is a summarized excerpt from the report:

The United States is expected to import $23 billion in toys in 2008, 90 percent of that from China. Imports this year represent 90 percent of U.S. toys, which is the highest toy import level and share on record. Many nations producing our children's toys have extremely lax safety standards and enforcement. Yet, while toy imports exploded by 562 percent from 1980 to 2008, the budget of the agency responsible for toy safety, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), was cut by 23 percent, with staffing cut nearly 60 percent during the same period.

"While production of our children's toys has become globalized, our consumer safety system and its protections against injury and death have not,"said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division.

As of 2007, the CPSC had no full-time staff at any of 326 U.S. ports and mostly focused part-time energies on Los Angeles and New York, leaving 324 ports virtually unchecked, according to the CPSC. In 2008, the CPSC claims to be monitoring at least nine of America's 326 ports, but could not confirm if there were any full-time safety inspectors at any U.S. port.

The report concludes that to bring U.S. product safety policy up to date with the realities of globalized production and thus effectively remedy the imported product safety crisis, Congress and the Obama administration must:

• Alter various provisions of U.S. trade agreements that currently encourage the off-shoring of manufacturing and limit border inspection and imported product safety standards.
• Provide domestic agencies responsible for product safety with new authority to inspect products and facilities overseas such that a nationís failure to cooperate with inspections would result in imports from that nation being halted (as is U.S. policy for imported meat and poultry).
• Temporarily halt suspicious imports via a ìhot buttonî prior to a hearing.
• Generate funding to ensure inspection of goods produced offshore.
• Require import bonding to fund recalls

For More Information

Public Citizen

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Congress   ♦   Consumer Protection   ♦