Chinese
authorities seize 20,000 tonnes of illegal meat products and detains gang
passing off fox, mink and rat as mutton
guardian.co.uk,
Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing, Friday 3 May 2013
Police in China have arrested 904 people for "meat-related offences" over the past three months, including a gang that made more than £1m by passing off fox, mink and rat meat as mutton, the country's public security ministry has announced.
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| China's other food safety scares include reports of glow-in-the-dark pork, exploding watermelons and fake eggs. Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP |
Police in China have arrested 904 people for "meat-related offences" over the past three months, including a gang that made more than £1m by passing off fox, mink and rat meat as mutton, the country's public security ministry has announced.
Since
January, authorities have seized 20,000 tonnes of illegal products and solved
382 cases of meat-related crime – primarily the sale of toxic, diseased and
counterfeit meat.
One
suspect, named Wei, earned more than £1m over the past four years by purchasing
fox, mink and rat meat, treating it with gelatin, carmine (a colour produced
from ground beetles) and nitrate, then selling it as mutton at farmers' markets
in Jiangsu province and Shanghai. Authorities raided Wei's organisation in
February, arresting 63 suspects and seizing 10 tonnes of meat and additives.
Suspects in
the Baotou city produced fake beef and lamb jerky from duck meat and sold it to
markets in 15 provinces. Levels of E coli in the counterfeit product
"seriously exceeded standards", the ministry said.
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| A baby treated for kidney stones after drinking tainted milk powder, in Chengdu, China. Photograph: China Photos/Getty |
Hao, another suspect, from Fengxiang city, Shaanxi province, last year sold mutton that had turned black and reeked of agricultural chemicals to a barbecue restaurant, killing one customer and poisoning a handful of others.
In Fujian
province, five suspects were arrested and two factories shut for butchering
disease-ridden pig carcasses and selling their meat in nearby provinces. The
suspects had been hired by the agriculture ministry to collect the carcasses
from farmers and dispose of them properly.
Authorities
closed two factories in the south-western province of Guizhou for soaking
chicken feet in hydrogen peroxide before shipping them to markets. And in
Zhenjiang city, Jiangsu province, two people were arrested for selling pork
products that were made with meat from "poor quality pig heads".
China's
meat markets are already reeling from a spring riddled with food safety scares.
Pork sales plummeted in March after about 16,000 pig carcasses were dredged
from a river in Shanghai, an incident authorities have yet to fully explain. A
virulent strain of avian flu has killed 26 people and put more than 129 inhospital since mid-April, wreaking havoc on the domestic poultry industry.
New
guidelines calling for harsher penalties for those found guilty of producing or
selling unsafe food products were announced by the country's top court on
Friday.
The supreme
people's court said the guidelines would list as crimes acts such as the sale
of food excessively treated with chemicals or made from animals that have died
from disease or unknown causes.
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| A gang made more than £1m by passing off mink and rat meat as mutton. Photograph: PA |
China's
food safety authorities are turning their attention to dairy products,
according to the Xinhua state news agency. In 2008, more than 54,000 infants
became ill and six were killed after being fed milk and baby formula that was tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.
Other food
safety scandals in recent years include reports of glow-in-the-dark pork,
exploding watermelons, cadmium-laced rice, fake eggs, salmonella-tainted
seafood, carcinogenic recycled cooking oil and pesticide-soaked fruit.
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