The chances of foot-and-mouth (FMD) contaminated meat being smuggled out of Hong Kong is “very low,” insisted Bess Chow, an information officer for China’s custom and excise department. It could not however be ruled out, she admitted, responding to news that British Agriculture minister Nick Brown was blaming the country’s FMD devastation on illegal meat smuggled from South Asia.
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A report into the causes of the epidemic currently sweeping the British countryside was presented to the British parliament yesterday, clearly blaming the devastation on a ring of meat smugglers, who supplied a Chinese restaurant in the North East. From here, the meat found its way as waste into the pigswill used at a farm in nearby Heddon-on-the-Wall. It is here that the outbreak is believed to have begun.
Chow maintained however: “The possibility that this meat came from Hong Kong is very low because we have sound measures to combat cross-boundary crimes, including the smuggling of pork.” Indeed, over the course of last year, SAR customs officials seized illegal pork with a market value of HK$4.56m. Through January and February of this year alone, they have uncovered pork worth over HK$1.28m.
A spokeswoman from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department was more reserved on the issue, commenting, “We will await the official report.” She added that a proposed change in the law to ban diseased animal by-products should be seen as a precautionary measure: “We are simply considering amending the law so that in future, if we needed to impose a ban on the by-products of diseased animals, we would have the power to do so.”
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