Prices spike on Vitamin C--China controls 80% of market. (Shelley Duncan hits homerun).

(I noticed this just before Dave Duncan's son Shelley hit his first major league homerun at Yankee Stadium).

• Baseball players need supplements (as do ordinary people)--I didn't realize China controls 80% of the Vitamin C market, that they're decreasing production, raising prices, and providing a product that could be poisonous anyway.

"A sharp rise in the international price of vitamin C is focusing fresh attention on the risks of the world's growing dependence on China for essential food supplies and additives.

• China, which exports more than 80 percent of the world's ascorbic acid — also known as vitamin C and a key food preservative — appears to have cut production over the past several months, pushing prices up by more than 200 percent to a four-year high.

Customers have scrambled for supplies of the additive, found in thousands of processed foods from fruit drinks to organic hamburger rolls, from applesauce to granola.

• The production cutback follows a Chinese government drive to enforce pollution limits on chemical and pharmaceutical companies, sources in the vitamin industry say. The four biggest Chinese vitamin C producers are also facing a price-fixing suit in a New York court. Since January, prices have risen from $3.40 a kilo to $11 a kilo, according to industry sources." (Nice).

From The Christian Science Monitor article, "China's Grip on Vitamin C, Prices, Spike for Key Food Additive," 7/20/07. Via Lucianne.com.

• No one should go to China, and certainly not our baseball players.

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