New APPG for Food Security hears of huge ASF risk from illegal imports

Following the formation of the new group in September, this week the All Party Parliamentary Group for Food Security held its first substantive meeting, looking at the issue of biosecurity and borders.

We were pleased to be joined by representatives of the Dover Port Health Authority, who are on the front line in protecting our biosecurity and are key to helping prevent diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease and African swine fever arriving in the UK. The scale of food being brought into the country illegally is on the rise, with 15 tonnes being seized at Dover in October alone.

The team from DPHA were able to talk through some of the recent cases of illegally imported POAO that they have intercepted on the border, with, it must be said, some fairly graphic images accompanying it. The Parliamentarians that were in attendance had a myriad of questions to ask of DPHA and they were quite simply in disbelief at the situation that was being presented to them.

The group saw everything from raw frozen pig skins being mixed into commercially compliant loads and pig and sheep casings that originated from China, were processed in Romania and then transported in the unrefrigerated lockers underneath an artic lorry, to commercially packaged mince and sausages labelled for the Romanian domestic market only and completely unlabelled shipments of wild boar.