Marketplace Magic! Chinese Entrepreneurs Find Buyers For Diseased, Heavy Metal-Laden Pork!

[hatrack]

The 6,000 rotting pigs floating toward Shanghai may pose a public health problem, but at least they are not part of a much greater threat. If they had not been thrown into the Huangpu River, it is emerging, they might well have ended up on dinner plates.

The discovery of the dead pigs has thrown a spotlight on a little-known practice that insiders say is not uncommon in China: Farmers sell pigs that have died from disease to underground traders, who then sell the pork illegally to consumers and food processing firms.

On Wednesday, 46 men were jailed in Wenling, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, for selling meat from sick pigs. Wenling is not far from Jiaxing, another hog-rearing district whence officials say the pigs found in the Huangpu are believed to have come.

In the past two years at least six other similar cases have come to court in different parts of China, suggesting that the practice is widespread. “The pig mortality rate is high and farmers sell the carcasses to people in the illegal business so as to recoup some of their losses,” says Feng Yonghui, an analyst with Zhongkeyiheng, an agri-business consultancy in Beijing.

EDIT

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2013/0314/China-s-pig-dumping-scandal-puts-spotlight-on-illegal-pork-trade

[jollyreaper2112]

1. the magic of the free market

A winner is you!

[womanofthehills]

2. Remember the 08 heparin deaths (Chinese pig intestines)

I remember because my mom was in the hospital and almost died from heparin shots.

http://thepumphandle.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/china-pig-intestines-and-the-fda/

The process of making heparin begins with the intestines of slaughtered pigs, from which mucous membrane is collected and cooked, eventually producing a dry substance known as crude heparin. …

In a village called Xinwangzhuang, nearly every house along a narrow street doubles as a tiny heparin operation, where teams of four to eight women wearing aprons and white boots wash, splice, separate and process pig intestines into sausage casings and crude heparin.

The floors had large puddles and drainage channels; the workshops were dilapidated and unheated; and steam from the production process fogged up the windows and soaked the walls. There were large ovens to cook ingredients and halls lined with barrels to store enzymes, resins, intestines and wastewater.

[pscot]

3. Special on Moo shu pork

with 3 pancake, one dollar off.

[Heywood J]

4. From the same wacky place that gave us leaded toys and melamine pet foot...

Another article: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2013/0311/Dead-pigs-in-Shanghai-water-supply-don-t-ring-alarm-bells-for-Chinese-officials

Local residents of one pig-rearing village upstream from Shanghai told the national broadcaster China Central Television on Sunday that disposing of dead pigs in the river was a common practice. “After the pigs died of illness, [they] just dumped them in the river … constantly. Every day,” one villager said.
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Thousands of pigs in the Shanghai area have succumbed to epidemic disease in recent months, according to the Jiaxing Daily, a government-run paper in a hog-raising region southwest of Shanghai.

My obvious question becomes why I should trust any food that comes from that country. Time to find somewhere more local than the supermarket for meat.