5.6M kilos smuggled pork to be buried - Sinag

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

DAGUPAN CITY - “Sorry prisoners the 5.6 million kilos smuggled pork are not for you,” quipped recently by the anti-smuggling group Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura (SINAG) president when he cited that the seized 183 containers of imported meat would be buried instead of being feed to thousands of prisoners all over the country.

Sen. Cynthia Villar urged the Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Customs to immediately destroy around four million kilos of frozen meat left rotting at the Manila port since last year. File photo/EDD GUMBAN

Engineer Rosendo So said that the remaining refrigerated 183 that were part of the 203 container vans held at the Bureau of Custom (BoC) in Manila are already expired and could endanger the health of the Filipinos.

“It was seized in 2014 but even they were frozen there is a warning on each of the boxes there that they should be consumed before 2016,” The SINAG President cited.

He was thankful that the vans have been impounded because aside from gnawing the profit of the “backyard” Filipino hog raisers,” who composed 70 percent of the swine industry, the meat could endanger the buyers of street foods like “bola-bola, siomai, and others”

The BoC should be subjecting them to rendering for feeds but the process was slow so they opted to bury them.

Rendering, So explained, is a process that converts waste animal tissue into stable, value added materials like feeds.

The decision was approved by the Department of the Environment and Resources and the Department of Health, according to him.

He cited that from the original 2013 container vans, 20 of them were whisked outside the BoC by the importers.

He said 143 of them were consigned to Lean Pasture Trading, Lucky Sisters Meat Trading and Jcore Enterprises.

The other 40 containers are still to be identified of their owners.

The SINAG’s president said that 183 of the container vans if computed on their import price are worth Php 322 million.

“183 containers multiplied by 5.3 kilos multiplied by sixty pesos equal three hundred twenty two million pesos,” he told Pulso ng Masa’s program at DZRD 981 Sonshine Radio here.