Diseased pork entering supply chain

病死猪进入食品供应链

Source: Global Times （来源：环球时报）

By Pan Yan（记者:潘燕）

"The flesh of tens of millions of pigs that have died of disease and then been processed into ham and sausages flows into the market in China every year," Yang Guoying, a 32-year-old financial columnist who was the general manager of two Jiangsu-based agricultural companies from 2007 to last year, told the Global Times Tuesday.

The scandal over pigs fed with foodstuff containing clenbuterol, an illegal additive that prevents them from accumulating fat, led to a public outcry and raised awareness of pork safety problems in the country, CCTV said in March.

Many pork processing factories, including Jiyuan Shuanghui Food Co, a subsidiary of China's largest meat processor Shuanghui Group, were found to be involved.

Yang said to the Global Times that the clenbuterol scandal was just the tip of the iceberg, according to his four years of experience in the industry. 

According to Yang, over the last 10 years, nearly 10 percent of all pigs on the market have died of diseases such as swine fever. 

"About 600 million pigs are sold every year, which means that 60 million will have died of disease. Half of these dead pigs are buried or abandoned, but the remaining 20 to 30 million end up sold as food," Yang said, adding the number was a conservative estimate.

Diseased flesh

In recent years, cases of factories processing long-dead pigs have been found in many cities in China.

The Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily exposed an illegal factory in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, which processed the flesh of pigs that had died of disease in January this year.

The report said that one ton of such bacon was produced in the small factory and the packaged products were marked with the Safety Certification issued by the quality supervision department.

An insider told the newspaper that the pork from disease-ridden pigs was dipped for two days into nitrite, a food additive, to preserve the color of the meat during processing. It was then smoked overnight with more color additives to be turned into delicious-looking bacon. The factory paid 6 yuan ($0.90) for a kilogram of pork from disease-ridden pigs, and charged 20 yuan ($3) for a kilogram of bacon.

Insiders reported that the safest way to distribute diseased bacon was to sell both qualified and unqualified products under the brand of a well-known manufacturer.

The Beijing Times reported in November last year that Beijing police had raided a secret factory in Haidian district that used diseased pork. The report said a large amount of such pork had been sold to breakfast vendors or butchers' shops.

Piggy dealers

"There's now an industrial chain around dead pigs. Some people have made it their job to collect and sell them to factories," Yang said to the Global Times Tuesday.

These "pig brokers" are mostly farmers who have connections with the local health authorities, according to a report in the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post this March. They have reliable sources and can avoid inspections through bribery. Even if found out, they would only be fined 2,000 to 3,000 yuan ($306 – $459), but if all goes well they can make several thousand yuan a month. The report also showed that some of them work in the local health department.

"Diseased pigs should be buried by the raiser," Yang said. "But they'll often sell them to brokers to recoup some of their expenses. A broker will pay 100 yuan ($15) for a pig weighing 35 to 60 kilograms, or 150 to 200 yuan if they weigh more than that."

"If the country could subsidize farmers so that they suffer no losses even if their pigs die, farmers might resist the temptation to sell the dead animals to brokers," Yang told the Global Times Tuesday.

Yang said the best way was to learn from Taiwan, which had similar problems a decade ago.

"The government there subsidize fertilizer companies to collect the dead pigs and turn them into organic fertilizer, which is really environmentally-friendly," Yang added.

Sang Liwei, a lawyer who helped revise the Food Safety Law, said that the core problems in this pork safety issue lie in the lack of supervision from relevant departments, and suggested building a strict accountability system for government officials.

"In China, officials from departments that failed to supervise the quality and safety of food normally received administrative penalties such as being transferred to other posts or removal from the post. That is not enough. Their criminal liabilities should be investigated too," Sang said to the Global Times, adding that only when the cost of crime was increased would people be more cautious.