RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Chinese authorities reported on Thursday, August 13th, that they detected Covid-19 in a routine control of a cargo of chicken wings imported from Brazil. According to the report, the virus was present in a sample collected in the city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong in the south of the country.
The chicken came from an Aurora plant in Santa Catarina state, according to the Chinese government. However, people who had contact with the contaminated products tested negative for the coronavirus. Nevertheless, the announcement raised concerns about the potential for foodstuffs to cause new outbreaks of the disease. The Chinese alert also raised a possible new element in the global trade war.
The news came the day after traces of the coronavirus were detected in frozen shrimp packages from Ecuador found in a town in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui. This week, the New Zealand government began investigating the potential for a new outbreak of the disease in the country to have originated in refrigerated freight imported from overseas.
In light of the news, on Thursday afternoon the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) minimized the risk of the coronavirus being transmitted through food packaging and urged people not to fear the virus entering the food chain. “There is no evidence that the food chain is involved in the transmission of this virus,” said W.H.O. Emergency Director Michael Ryan.
The Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture said it has not yet been officially notified by the Chinese authorities about the case, but that it has approached the GACC (General Customs Administration of China) for details. The Brazilian Association of Animal Protein (ABPA) reported in a statement that the production sector is analyzing the reports.
“It is not yet clear at what point the potential contamination of the packaging occurred, and whether it occurred during the export shipment process,” the statement said. There are no new restrictions on Brazilian imports for the time being, according to the Chinese Embassy in Brazil. The country has currently six slaughterhouses with exports to China suspended due to concerns about the coronavirus.
Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina said that the detection of an infected chicken imported from Brazil is not positive for the country’s image – currently having the second-highest number of infections and deaths from the disease in the world, which passed 105,000 on Thursday – but said she does not believe that the incident will affect the export of the Brazilian product.
According to José Augusto de Castro, president of the Foreign Trade Association of Brazil (AEB), although details are lacking and there is no formal announcement to the Brazilian government, the news of chicken contamination raises concerns among buyers. “Commercially, it raises concerns. Both directly, of how China will react, our largest chicken importer and trading partner, as well as other buyers,” he says. Brazil, the world’s largest producer of chicken meat, was until 2017 China’s leading supplier of frozen chicken, for a figure close to US$1 billion (US$200 million) a year.
However, Castro points out that some announcements by China may sometimes have only a commercial goal. “This announcement from China may be either true or false, for reasons of a price discount. You begin to consider even absurd things like: would China not be posting this news to please the US, which is our competitor in chicken exports? I don’t know, it could be anything,” he says. For now, the impact does not seem to be great after the W.H.O. announcement, which minimized the risks of contamination through food.
In the first half of this year, Brazil’s chicken exports increased 1.7 percent over the same months in 2019, reaching 2.11 million tons, according to ABPA data. The South region (Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná) accounts for 62 percent of the total; the Southeast (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo) for 18 percent and the Midwest for 14 percent.
In a note, the Santa Catarina Poultry Association said it is in contact with the Chinese authorities to learn more about the incident. However, the association said that “Brazil is a country of excellence in the production of animal protein in the world, either because of its hygiene aspect or because of the safety of its production processes, which have been repeatedly audited by over 150 countries where the product is exported.”
Source: El País