China suspends meat imports in Brazil scandal
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CHINA has curtailed meat imports from Brazil after inspectors in the world’s biggest exporter of beef and poultry were accused by police of taking bribes to allow sales of rotten and salmonella-tainted meats.
China, which accounted for almost a third of the Brazilian meatpacking industry’s US$13.9 billion in exports last year, suspended imports of all meat products from Brazil as a precautionary measure.
Yesterday, it called for stricter safety measures in food shipments, as Brazilian officials scrambled to limit fallout from the corruption scandal.
“China is concerned by the quality problems of some meat products in Brazil,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters.
“We hope that the Brazilian side will conduct a thorough investigation of the case ... and take more stringent measures to ensure safe and reliable food exports to China.”
She declined to comment on when the ban on Brazilian meat imports might be lifted. That decision will be made by China’s Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
Senior Brazilian government officials spoke with the administration’s vice minister about the issue in a video conference yesterday, according to a source.
The meeting was the highest level discussion yet between the two nations, underscoring the urgency with which Brazil and China want to avoid further disruption in trade.
The European Commission, meanwhile, urged Brazil to ban four companies implicated in the scandal from exporting their meat to the European Union, spokesman Enrico Brivio told reporters in Brussels.
The EU “will guarantee that any of the establishments involved in the fraud will be suspended,” said Brivio, who didn’t name the companies or say how long the ban would last.
As the scandal deepened, Brazil’s Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi said the government had suspended exports from 21 processing plants.
But he also criticized the investigation by Brazil’s federal police into meatpacking companies, calling their findings “alarmist” and saying that they used a few isolated incidents to tarnish an entire industry that is maintaining rigorous standards.
An all-out ban on Brazilian meat exports would be a “disaster,” Maggi added. “I pray, I hope, I work so that does not happen,” he told reporters.
With other import curbs expected to follow, the scandal could deal a heavy blow to one of the few sectors of Latin America’s largest economy that has thrived during a two-year recession.
Last week, police named BRF SA and JBS SA, along with dozens of smaller rivals, in a two-year probe into how meatpackers allegedly paid off inspectors to overlook practices including processing rotten meat, shipping exports with traces of salmonella and simply not carrying out inspections of plants.
JBS is the world’s largest meat producer and BRF the biggest poultry exporter.
The companies have denied wrongdoing, and authorities have said no cases of death or illness have been linked to the tainted meat investigation.
Industry in jeopardy
Brazil’s President Michel Temer has sought to downplay the meatpacking probe, saying it involved only 21 of Brazil’s more than 4,800 meat processing units.
But Francisco Turra, head of Brazilian beef producers association ABPA, told reporters it had put the entire meat industry in jeopardy and “destroyed” a hard-won image of quality products.
South Korea’s agriculture ministry said it would tighten inspections of imported Brazilian chicken meat and temporarily ban sales of chicken products by BRF.
More than 80 percent of the 107,400 tons of chicken that South Korea imported last year came from Brazil, and BRF supplied almost half of that.
BRF could prove more vulnerable to the scandal since a larger share of its operations are physically based in Brazil, while JBS derives most of its sales from abroad, according to a report by Goldman Sachs analysts.
Chile is also temporarily banning imports of all Brazilian meat products.
In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city, the scandal left many consumers in doubt.
“My freezer at home is full of meat, and I don’t know what to do,” said Maria Fonseca, a saleswoman. “Should I eat it or just throw it all away?
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