BERLIN has started its investigation of the recent quarantine breach by a German firm that prompted the Department of Agriculture (DA) to ban all meat imports from Germany, its top envoy to the Philippines said.
German Ambassador to the Philippines Gordon Kricke said Berlin has received formal communication from the DA about the incident, wherein pork from Poland—one of the countries that reported an outbreak of African swine fever (ASF)—was included in the shipment of a German firm to the Philippines.
Kricke said an investigation into the incident has been launched. He said the incident worries Berlin as the ban imposed by the DA will affect many German firms.
“We are now in the stage of consulting with [Berlin] to see what happened and we will discuss this with Philippine authorities,” he told reporters in a news briefing in Makati City on Tuesday.
“It is in the very initial stage and we do not know what the situation is and what can be done to address this. But, of course, we would want German meat imports to be allowed again as soon as possible,” Kricke added.
The German envoy said he does not know how fast Berlin can resolve the issue, as the investigation has just started.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol told the BusinessMirror last week that he would ask Germany to fix the loopholes in its quarantine system that led to the incident.
The DA has suspended the system-wide accreditation of all foreign meat establishments in Germany after a German shipment was found to contain some pork products from Poland.
The suspension means that no German firm may export meat to the Philippines for an indefinite period of time.
If Germany wants to regain its export accreditation and resume trade, then it has to convince Philippine authorities that it has improved its quarantine system.
“The German co-mingling case causes great concern for Philippine quarantine authorities. Somehow it strengthens our earlier reservation on allowing shipment of pork from ASF high-risk countries,” Piñol said in an interview on Thursday. He was referring to his earlier controversial plan to include even so-called high-risk countries—those without ASF cases but share boundaries with ASF-affected ones—in the Philippines’s imports ban.
2nd biggest source
The Philippines purchased over 88 million kilograms of meat products from Germany last year, making it the country’s second-biggest source of meat imports, data from the Bureau of Animal Industry showed.
Meat Importers and Traders Association (Mita) President Jesus C. Cham earlier said the import ban on Germany is a “strong wake-up call” for the Netherlands, Austria and France to strengthen their quarantine system, particularly their documentation processes.
Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Austria have been deemed by the DA as high-risk countries as they share common borders with EU states that are already infected with ASF.
“The bigger concern is, how did the Polish pork pass through Germany’s quarantine system? The veterinary certificate is like a check, it cannot bounce. This is an issue of documentation,” Cham told the BusinessMirror last week.