12 arrests over meat from diseased pigs
Print Edition
A DOZEN vendors who bought sick or dead pigs cheap and sold the meat to butchers in a number of provinces have been arrested.
They are said to have bought the pigs at half the usual price from farms in east China’s Jiangxi Province and slaughtered the diseased animals at a number of locations before sending the pork to markets in Chongqing and nearby provinces, according to a China Central Television report.
Authorities in Jiangxi’s Gaoan and Fengcheng cities, where some of the dead and dying pigs were processed, said they had sealed a number of slaughter houses and placed their owners under arrest for further investigation, yesterday’s People’s Daily reported.
Investigations into premises in the province’s Shanggao County were also under way, the newspaper said.
A CCTV program aired at the weekend was the culmination of a yearlong undercover investigation into the pork vending chain in Jiangxi. One farm owner told an undercover reporter that there were several vending groups in Jiangxi, and farms would sell their dead or diseased pigs to the highest bidder.
One vendor, surnamed Chen, said he had been in the business for more than five years. One underground slaughter house in Shanggao where he took sick or dead pigs would process up to 200 pigs a day.
Chen said it had moved five times within the province over the years. The latest move was from Fengcheng to Shanggao. Police in Fengcheng told CCTV they had received a tip-off in March about illegal premises where sick or dead pigs were being processed. But when they went there it was already empty.
Should be destroyed
Meat from pigs which have died or are sick is not allowed to enter the market because of the risk of disease.
Such animals should be destroyed in a process witnessed by local farming supervisors, or taken to enterprises that will make the meat into industrial oil or organic fertilizer. Farmers can get some compensation from insurance companies for such animals but a number choose to sell them to illegal vendors.
Healthy pigs usually sell at 14 yuan (US$2.25) per kilogram. Chen would buy sick or dead pigs at 6 yuan per kilo, selling them on to illegal slaughter houses at 7 yuan per kilo, CCTV said. The meat would then be sent to butchers in wet markets, where it would be mixed with legal meat before going on sale.
Chen told the CCTV reporter that the illegal slaughter house in Shanggao had received lots of complaints from nearby residents, especially because of the smell in the heat of summer. However, it was never ordered to shut down as the owner had “a good relationship” with the local authority.
The owner of a licensed slaughter house in Gaoan, which also did business with Chen, said that what he had been doing was “against the regulations, but not against the law.”
The owner told CCTV: “We will receive tip-offs and suspend work before the local authority hold inspections. We are licensed, so what we are doing is breaking the regulations instead of breaking the law. The former can be solved by money.”
Police have arrested Chen and another 11 vendors in Jiangxi. Police in the other provinces involved — Hunan, Guangdong, Shandong, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu, have launched joint investigations into the trade.
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