Conservationists want authorities to stop the trafficking of poultry from the mainland, an act that they say occurs in broad daylight in Hong Kong waters.
The government does not carry out tests to determine if chickens on sale in village wet markets have been smuggled in. This is something that bothers conservationists.
“[Smugglers] are packing the frozen meat in China and saying it’s from other sources. It’s easy to just print a box,” says Paul Hodgson, a reef specialist who runs a marine consultancy business in Sai Kung, and has spent time observing smugglers.
He said that, on one occasion, he had found more than 60 tonnes of chicken meat on the reefs, some of it in boxes marked “Belgium.”
Smugglers use small fishing boats, called P4s, to offload poultry onto islands in New Territories country parks.
In some cases, local fishermen and villagers remove the chicken from the reefs and islands where it is sometimes dumped to avoid detection. Hodgson says such chicken can sometimes end up in village freezers and wet markets.
He says Customs and Excise Department officers should be arresting these poultry smugglers, but instead much of their time is taken up with efforts to detect pirated DVDs that are being smuggled in.
The department disagrees with Hodgson’s assertion.
An official says the department’s initiative to stop smuggling, called Operation Eagle, has, since its commencement in October, netted 255,151 kilograms of poultry up to the end of December, and “28 live chickens/birds at the air, land and sea boundary.”
From the start of the year through to April 12, a further 22,490 kilograms have been seized, but the customs official did not say where that illegal meat was seized.
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“I think they are culling the chickens [in China] and putting them in boxes, saying they’re from Belgium, and sending it out.”
He wonders: “Why don’t they just bring it into Hong Kong? It would have cleared through customs.”
They do not bring it into Hong Kong because of fears about avian flu and the government’s screening measures. The government says it does everything in its power to control the flow of poultry into Hong Kong, especially in the wake of the avian flu fears in the past year.
But it does not use testing “regularly” to verify whether frozen meat in village markets actually comes from legitimate sources, according to an information officer at the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department.
“Officers are deployed [in village wet markets] randomly to check the live chickens, but not to check whether they are smuggled,” the information officer says.
She also said it is common practice for inspectors to check receipts of meat sales to vendors if, in certain cases, it is suspected the meat had been brought in illegally.
“According to our inspections, if they cannot show the receipts, we would follow up case by case. Sometimes we would charge them, but first we would seize the meat,” the officer says.
The department checks for certificates that verify the chicken had been brought in legally.
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Hodgson recommends that the government first find out where the chicken is being shipped from, and in this way someone can search for a solution to ease any fears over chicken meat.
“Get some of the chicken … and find out where the hell it is actually coming from,” Hodgson says.
“What I think is that the government doesn’t want to know, so they are not going to do it.”….