Fish & Seafood

Crackdown on Frozen Food Smuggling Ongoing in China

LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr

Chinese police continue to be hot on the trail of frozen food smugglers, having nabbed seven suspects on April 2 for allegedly bringing an estimated US $16 million worth of products into the country illegally.

“In a coordinated operation in Chongqing, Guangdong and Guangxi, more than 100 police officers seized over 400 tons of smuggled food,” according to a Xinhua report.

“With no quarantine inspection at customs and questionable refrigeration conditions in transit, smuggled food poses huge health risks,” stated a customs officer in Chongqing, a sprawling municipality at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers in southwestern China.

Cracking down on smuggled food products is apparently a higher priority than usual in the Chinese government this year, which in 2017 officially launched an anti-smuggling campaign. In January PRC customs officials in Jiangsu Province arrested a gang suspected of smuggling frozen seafood valued at $31 million over a four-year period. According to Xinhua, over 8,000 tons of shrimp, cuttlefish and fish fillets have illegally entered the country from Vietnam since 2013.

The food was reportedly entered through China-Vietnam border points and was thereafter sold in the cities of Wuxi and Suzhou. In total, Chinese customs officials seized 9,000 tons of smuggled frozen food products in 2017.