A German farmer stands between stacks of eggs on his chicken farm in Emstek, northern Germany, on January 10, 2011. Photo: IC
Germany's dioxin contamination problems deepened Wednesday as China banned pork and egg imports and it emerged that tainted meat may be in circulation.
A day after authorities ordered the slaughter of 140 pigs at a German farm after discovering dangerous dioxin levels in pork for the first time since a scare began last week, China said its ban was effective immediately.
The country has banned imports of "German-produced edible pork and egg products," the country's product safety watchdog, General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, announced in a statement on its website dated Tuesday, saying the move was aimed at safeguarding the health of consumers.
Authorities also said they would inspect goods shipped from Germany prior to Tuesday and would release them only if found to be safe.
"This is a scandal that is growing bigger and worse every day," Johannes Remmel, agriculture minister in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) daily.
Germany exported 7,000 tons of pork to China in 2009, the German government said, worth some six million euros ($7.78 million).
Previously only South Korea had banned German pork imports, while Slovakia had halted sales of German eggs and poultry meat, despite Berlin's repeated assurances there was no immediate risk to human health.
The scare began last week when it emerged that a German firm may have supplied some 3,000 tons of fatty acids only meant for industrial uses to makers of animal feed late last year. The feed was then widely distributed.
There are also indications that the firm, Harles und Jentzsch, has been selling the contaminated fatty acids since last March, a Schleswig-Holstein agriculture ministry spokesman told Wednesday's Westfalen-Blatt daily.
With eggs found to have high levels of dioxin, which can cause cancer in high doses, authorities destroyed 100,000 eggs last week and banned almost 5,000 poultry and pigs farms from selling produce while tests were conducted.
Most of these farms have been since given the all-clear, with just 490 still subject to the lockdown as of late Tuesday, according to the agriculture ministry in Berlin. Monday authorities said that pork with high levels of dioxin had been discovered at a farm in the state of Lower Saxony, and that meat from pigs from the farm slaughtered could be in shops.
