Another food scandal has erupted after an investigation into a wholesaler in Taichung, which allegedly distributed cereals treated with toxic chemicals to leading supermarkets and hypermarket chains as certified organic products.
The Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday detained the proprietors of Cheng Fung Co (政豐公司), Liao Ying-shu (廖英舒) and his wife, Chen Hsing-hui (陳幸蕙), and said they would file forgery and other charges due to violations of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法).
After two months of surveillance, Taichung prosecutors raided the company’s offices and warehouses on Thursday with the support of police and health inspectors.
Taichung Department of Health officials said they confiscated 2 tonnes of cereals, multi-grain foodstuffs and other agricultural products, most already past their expiry date, some by more than a year.
They also found expired cereals and foodstuffs kept in moldy conditions that had been spoiled by insects, health inspectors said.
Taichung prosecutors said the company used Gastoxin, an insecticide made of aluminum phosphide, to treat the expired food.
Gastoxin is considered highly toxic to humans and ingestion can cause diarrhea, difficulty breathing, pulmonary edema, respiratory failure, rapid pulse, hypotension, dizziness and even death in some cases, according to toxicology studies.
“After treating the foodstuffs with Gastoxin, they repackaged the cereals, multi-grain foodstuffs, and other agriculture products for sale at a number of leading supermarkets and hypermarkets,” Taichung Deputy Chief Prosecutor Kuo Ching-tung (郭景東) said. “The proprietors made counterfeit MOA [a Japanese organic farming promoter] labels and sold the expired items as organic health food in small packages at supermarkets.”
The repackaging included changing the date of manufacture and the expiry date, Kuo said.
Prosecutors said the fake organic foodstuffs included multi-grain powder, red beans, mung beans, lentils, peanuts, pearl barley, cassia seeds, mushrooms, shallots and other products.
Kuo said the company had been supplying the fake organic products since 2008 and they were estimated to have generated revenue of more than NT$300 million (US$9.4 million) over the past eight years, based on its average annual sales of about NT$40 million.
Health officials said that although Gastoxin is considered highly toxic, usually only small traces remained on the foodstuffs and therefore it should not pose too much of a danger to consumers.
Liao and Chen said that they grew up in rural farming families and that the cereals and grains were still edible once they had been cleaned to remove worms, insects and mold, arguing that it was wasteful to throw out food just because it had passed its expiry date, prosecutors said.
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