100,000 Tons of Smuggled Meat, Some From 1970s, Seized Across China
By Crystal Tse
“Don’t call yourself Chinese if you haven’t tried everything on the periodic table,” goes a saying in China, a reference to a string of food safety scandals in recent years.
In the most recent episode, 100,000 tons of smuggled frozen meat has been seized across China, some of it more than 40 years old, the state news agency Xinhua reported. The chicken wings, beef and pork uncovered in the customs operation in 14 provinces and regions were valued at up to 3 billion renminbi, or $483 million, and 20 people have been arrested, it said.
The origin of the meat was not clear. According to Xinhua, however, the meat typically was shipped to Hong Kong, then taken to Vietnam, where traders would smuggle it across the border to China without declaring it with customs officials or undergoing the required entry-exit inspection and quarantine. Some of the meat was found stamped with packing dates going back to the 1970s.
To hold down costs, the meat would be transported in ordinary, nonrefrigerated trucks, sometimes for more than 12 hours.
According to the Changsha Administration of Customs, in Hunan Province, one-third of the meat on offer at the largest wholesale market in the city was found to be illegally imported.
“It was too smelly! A truck full of it! I almost threw up when the door opened,” Zhang Tao, a Changsha official involved in the crackdown, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
After being refrozen, the meat was distributed to retailers, supermarkets and restaurants in Guangdong, Sichuan and other provinces. China Central Television, the state broadcaster, showedworkers in the southern city of Shenzhen repackaging the imported meat with Chinese labels, even though imported products, if legal, tend to be more profitable than local ones.
(More from The New York Times)
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