Chinese Criminal Gangs Spreading African Swine Fever To Force Farmers To Sell Pigs Cheaply So They Can Profit (scmp.com) 57
Chinese criminals have been exploiting the country's African swine fever crisis by intentionally spreading the disease to force farmers to sell their pigs for a low price before smuggling the meat and selling it on as healthy stock, state media has reported. From a report: Sometimes the gangs spread rumours about the virus, which is fatal to pigs, but in more extreme cases they are using drones to drop infected items into farms, according to an investigation by the magazine China Comment, which is affiliated to state news agency Xinhua. The disease has reduced the country's pig herds by over 40 per cent because of mass culls designed to stop it spreading further. The resulting shortages have seen pork prices more than double, providing opportunities for the criminals to exploit. The magazine's report said that the gangs tried to spread panic among farmers to force them to sell their livestock at a discount rate. Sometimes they spread rumours about the disease spreading in the locality and may even leave dead pigs on the side of a road to make farmers believe the infection is spreading.
Wow (Score:2)
Evil AND retarded. Hard feat to achieve.
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Evil AND retarded. Hard feat to achieve.
So far there have been zero arrests, and there is no actual evidence that any of this is happening.
This is more likely to be a conspiracy theory.
When a farmer's pigs are dying, he is going to be angry. He isn't going to accept that it is just nature taking its toll. He wants someone to be mad at. This conspiracy provides that.
Re: Wow (Score:5, Informative)
"a vet forged certificates for infected animals."
Same chinese who left a 2 year old child to die, tripped twice by trucks on the middle of the road in broad daylight. Looks legit to me. [wikipedia.org]
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"smugglers had been bribing inspectors and faking quarantine certificates to smuggle the animals across provincial borders."
Which smugglers? What were their names? Which inspectors? How much were they bribed? Where did this happen? When were they arrested? Who arrested them?
"a vet forged certificates for infected animals."
Which vet? When was he arrested? Who arrested him? Where did the incident happen?
Broad claims and accusations without any names, dates, places, or specifics are hallmarks of a good conspiracy theory.
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Same chinese who left a 2 year old child to die, tripped twice by trucks on the middle of the road in broad daylight. Looks legit to me.
Wow. Over 1bn people in that country and you found the same 20 people in both cases? Why haven't they been arrested! /s
On a serious note, linking a story about 18 people not helping a hit and run victim as some kind of reflection of the Chinese as a whole is just stupid. The only real story here is that it was captured on CCTV. There are countless people all over the world both in "shithole" countries as well as in the great United States of America or any other western nation who apathetically hit and run
Re: Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, this doesn't make sense. If these guys were so slick Hong Kong could just hire them to get out of their predicament.
Re: Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Beijing already hired them, and they have way more money.
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When a farmer's pigs are dying, he is going to be angry. He isn't going to accept that it is just nature taking its toll. He wants someone to be mad at. This conspiracy provides that.
In Europe, back in the Middle Ages, folks used to blame livestock deaths on witches. Folks got mighty angry at the witches, and burned them alive. They stopped burning witches in 1782.
Does Chinese folklore have old myths about witches, and what to do about them . . . ?
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Middle Ages
1782
Pick one?
Re: Wow (Score:2)
"Middle ages" is when they started, "1782" is when they stopped. I don't know whether that's true, but that's pretty clearly his intended message.
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Started well before the Christian age, probably before written history.
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In China, it's very likely that these 'criminals' are in service of the state. China is on the precipice of a real famine, with food from the US cut down, they've been pushing hard to increase local production and the swine fever thing is very inconvenient. In communist countries, convenient things often get resolved creatively by the state, eg. the USSR had factories that were only there to demonstrate everyone had a job but did not actually function because there was no source material and the state event
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Re: Wow (Score:3)
I think what he's suggesting is that people may be running out of food, so the "criminals" get blamed rather than let the government accept responsibility for failing to negotiate an equitable trade deal with the US.
Is that true? I have no idea. The thing with state run media, especially in socialist/communist countries where it's always necessary to deflect blame from the fact that it just doesn't work, is that you can't trust state run media. Hell, if it weren't for an American tourist snuggling his film
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Well, look at it this way. There's a pork shortage so the price has gone up. There's a healthy profit snuffling its way through the mud just down the road. It's probably going to end up getting culled due to swine flu at some point.
So claim it's got the flu already, offer the farmer a chance to cut his losses, sell on for massive profit.
If he doesn't believe you, claims his farm has no swine flu, well, you can fix that for him. Now you still make massive profit, you just need to buy your dumplings elsewhere
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
China is on the precipice of a real famine, with food from the US cut down
No, they aren't. Brasil and Argentina are taking over the market that America abandoned. Thailand and Vietnam have also increased food exports to China.
China is eating less pork and more chicken. No one is starving because of the pork shortage.
Wow, another conspiracy nutter (Score:2, Insightful)
You do know that China is buying less food from America in order to punish American farmers, and Trump.
They aren't doing it to starve their own people. They learnt their lesson last time...
It's quite common in America to blame government for all your problems (the other team of course) but in China, the government has raised living standards and had good strong growth for over 30 years now.
You are just projecting your own anti-government hysterics onto others.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
People tend to forget, in a country of a billion, there will always be some stupid enough and greedy enough to do the worst possible things, like http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/... [time.com]. How can you possibly get away with selling fake eggs. Well really cheap labour and a lot of people to hide amongst, of course the mobile phone and the surveillance state, will kerb that kind of stupid petty crime. So I dare say a warning has gone out and people will now be on the look out for those individuals and it wont be that long till arrests.
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So not so Chinese, American corporate main stream media giving the illusion of being Chinese, so how truthful hard to tell.
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You don't need 1bn people for that. A country of 60 million was responsible in a European wide scandal involving horse meat in fake lasagne last decade.
A country of 20 million people was repsonsible for tainted contaminated eggs that none the less made it passed safety inspections into the rest of Europe and Asia.
Shitty people exist.
Re: Wow (Score:2)
Hard feat to achieve
Don't forget facial recognition, social credit and AI. The true road to oblivion by watering down the gene pool by a factor of 1.4 billion
Sci-fi come to life ... (Score:3)
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Part of why it's out of control in the PRC? (Score:3)
I haven't been following this really closely, but the impression I get is that the authorities have been completely unable to stop the spread of "pig ebola" inside the country, and as of late to neighboring countries, to the point probably at least half their 300 million pigs have died of it or been culled.
There could be many reasons for this, starting with wild pig populations and the traditional lack of isolation of the pigs (and birds and humans, likely the reason the PRC is the #1 breeding ground for new strains of the flu). Or this could be a Fake News from the government, which is losing some of its Mandate of Heaven as the country's #1 animal protein source by a large margin is evaporating, and prices are through the roof. But there are people this evil....
Not a PRoC pork crisis, yet (Score:2)
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That's not going to cut any ice with a population that measures in part its economic improvements as greater access to animal protein, and they already have enough Buddhist influence towards vegetarianism (you might have noticed that while it's a bit difficult for vegans to get what they want at Chinese restaurants, less strict vegetarians have no problems).
Alternative meat substitutions like fish and fowl that you suggest can't get around the problem that
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Where do I remember the election slogan "a chicken in every pot" from?
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Rejoice, animal rightists... this the the fate they wish upon pigs that are not raised in the closed, controlled conditions that bring us America's pork.
Supply Chain Tracking (Score:1)
smuggling the meat and selling it on as healthy stock
Selling it on to whom? Absent a tracking system (which was devised following the mad cow problem), wealthy consumers aren't going to buy from untraceable sources. Given that the Chinese government isn't one to pussy-foot around with criminals and they can get things done by edict pretty quickly, I expect a tracking system to be put in place rapidly. And people caught trying to bypass it with infected product will be lined up against walls and shot. And then billed for the bullet.
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Absent a tracking system (which was devised following the mad cow problem), wealthy consumers aren't going to buy from untraceable sources.
Either that or it will be one of the privileges of wealth.
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Given that the Chinese government isn't one to pussy-foot around with criminals and they can get things done by edict pretty quickly, I expect a tracking system to be put in place rapidly.
Most countries have had such systems in place for decades, for disease tracking and consumer protection purposes. Given their historical issues with animals and health, I'm surprised China doesn't already have one.
Gang is following the Chinese government? (Score:1)
China. Bah humbug (Score:2)
Naughty (Score:2)
Don't fuck with the Chinese Communist Party's pork chops or you will be slaughtered and _your_ organs will be sold.
The Times, they are a changing! (Score:1, Interesting)
3rd Kind (Score:2)
Sometimes they spread rumours about the disease spreading in the locality and may even leave dead pigs on the side of a road to make farmers believe the infection is spreading.
Hey! They took that idea from "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind"! Bah dee dah dee dahhh!
Market Control (Score:3, Funny)
How long until Big Bacon unleashes this upon the US consumer?
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"Big Bacon"? You know not there is a hug bacon surplus in the US just now?
lol yeah I'm gonna let scmp run js (Score:2)
You can't see the content without enabling javascript. I was going to RTFA, because I'm funny like that, but fuuuuuuuck that.
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The JavaScript is just to throw up a paywall so you haven't missed anything.
Good! (Score:2)
That means the Chinese Governments surveillance program sucks big time. if multiple gangs get away with this, especially since no country on this planet takes their pork as seriously as the Chinese.
Yeah, right (Score:3)
As a westerner, my brainwashing leads me to disbelieve anything state media states.
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My state doesn't even have its own media!
There is PBS, but that's all privately funded now.
Earth 1sters (Score:2)
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