Poultry Smugglers Nabbed

Smuggling is a long-established business in southern China, with its porous coastline, a nose for cash, and disregard for authorities far away. Smuggling of food products banned by authorities or assessed with steep duties thrives, but authorities have been trying to crack down over the last couple of years.

On June 20, Guangxi Province's customs, quarantine and inspection authority and provincial antismuggling office jointly announced the seizure of 700 metric tons of smuggled frozen animal products.

Customs investigators found that the suspects had set up a trading company in 2008 that mainly did business trading chicken and duck meat. They contacted suppliers through the Internet, set the volume, price and products and had shipments delivered to the Vietnamese port of Haiphong. The goods were shipped from there to Mong Cai, a city on the coast at the border of Guangxi and Vietnam. From there, goods were shipped up the Beilun River into China, then loaded onto vans and finally consolidated in trucks to be driven by expressway to four refrigerated warehouses in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Then products were labeled and sent to various places for final sale.

Over the 3 years the smuggling group operated, it moved 32,170 metric tons worth 566 million yuan. On March 9, the customs bureau rounded up dozens of people involved in the operation in a raid of 3 warehouses. Over 400 metric tons of products and bank accounts valued at 5.6 million yuan were seized. On June 20, authorities publicly announced the destruction of 700 metric tons of suspected smuggled goods, mostly chicken feet, but also frozen chicken meat and beef. The products mostly came from the United States, the U.K., and Brazil. It was not clear why the announcement was over 3 months after the raid in March or why the quantity destroyed exceeded the amount discovered in March.

Last year, the dim sums blog reported that chronic losses in China's poultry industry blamed on imports prompted the antidumping investigation and countervailing duties.



Another article from March 2010 specifically blamed smuggled chicken for the industry's troubles. It announced, "Since 2008, the industry has been in great crisis," with many companies shut down, farmers losing their jobs, and investments idle. The article blamed the world financial crisis and pressure from large volumes of poultry imports and smuggling.

This article estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 metric tons of poultry are smuggled into China through Hong Kong, Vietnam, and other countries each year, much of it from Brazil. It says:

"According to customs statistics, Hong Kong imported 810,000 mt of poultry meat in 2009, of which 430,000 mt came from Brazil. But Hong Kong consumes less than 150,000 mt annually. The remainder goes into China’s mainland. At the same time, analysis shows that over 200,000 mt of poultry meat from Argentina and the U.S. is smuggled into China."

The article cited plunging prices for ducklings and duck meat (this was published in "Waterfowl World" magazine) and "serious effects" on the whole industry chain. It worried that smuggling of U.S. poultry to evade countervailing duties would damage the industry.

The article's call for action points to the extreme difficulty of stopping smuggling. It calls for concerted action by multiple enforcement agencies, saying smuggling can be controlled "only if the public security, industrial-commercial bureaus, city management, health-sanitation, livestock, and technical supervision departments set up sustained inspection and investigation mechanisms and establish situation reporting and information sharing systems and strengthen market inspections." Good luck with that.

Well, at least they grabbed 700 mt in Guangxi.