Egg import trucks never checked
Egg inspectors have no powers to check lorries at ports for loads of illegal, unstamped eggs arriving in Britain.
This extraordinary loophole in our defence against major egg fraud has been revealed to the Ranger by Egg Marketing Inspectorate officials.
The admission throws new light on how the UK egg industry became victim to the massive free range egg scam currently being investigated by Defra which involved ten truck loads of unstamped battery eggs arriving here ever week for five years. These were then stamped with the ID codes of British free range or organic producers.
It has been widely reported that when the fraud was in full flow at least 180,000 dozen unstamped eggs from the Continent passed through our ports every seven days and that consumers have been duped out of £50 million.
Yet the men responsible for policing the marketing of eggs in this country have no authority to stop and check the trucks arriving in the UK despite the fact that moving unstamped eggs between EU countries is a clear breach of the Egg Marketing Regulations.
An EMI spokesman said: "The Regulations require that all table eggs destined for export outside the country of origin are stamped. However, free trade within the EU generally precludes the Inspectorate from carrying out checks at point of entry."
Only now are moves being made in an attempt to close the loophole.
The spokesman added: "The Inspectorate is currently exploring methods of doing this with other enforcement agencies to prevent unstamped eggs entering the UK."
He stressed that all known handlers—not just importers—of eggs from other Member States are regularly inspected. But clearly these checks failed to pick up the biggest egg scam ever perpetrated on the UK market.
The size and duration of the free range fraud also throws doubt on the effectiveness of the system under which inspectors identify "fake" eggs in the marketplace.
It is clear that if 500 million foreign cage eggs were stamped in Britain either they had entirely bogus ID codes which were never picked up or they were given the ID codes of genuine producers whose production figures would have been grossly distorted.
The Inspectorate stressed that it conducts spot-checks and detailed reconciliations at producers and packing centres, aimed at ensuring that the entire marketing chain is balanced correctly.
But bent packers would never keep public records of which dummy codes had been used on fake eggs. And once they are in the market place the EMI can only identify fake eggs if they bear a free range or organic mark but carry physical evidence of coming from a cage system.
So the Inspectorate's chief weapon against fraud in the marketplace is the use of ultra-violet lamps which can reveal tell-tale marks that prove an egg has rolled over the wire structures in a cage unit.
The spokesman declined to comment on whether new auditing procedures had been introduced since the EMI announced its discovery of the current free range fraud last October. But he said that during the last three years, the Inspectorate had "significantly improved" it's capabilities for detecting and gathering evidence of fraud or other offences and had been focusing attention on "less compliant premises".
The Inspectorate is convinced that on-farm egg stamping would create a major step forward in the security of the market.
"Marking on-farm would be the most significant step towards making fraud more difficult to perpetrate and easier to detect," the spokesman said. "To be as effective as possible, marking would have to be done on all eggs—including those destined for the food industry—so no eggs could move unstamped.
"Whilst on-farm marking would add to production costs it would also be a significant counter fraud measure and therefore increase surety for producers."
He said the industry could decide to introduce on-farm marking itself, as is done
in the assurance scheme K.A.T, which sources eggs from various EU Member States, primarily for the German retail market.
For more free range news visit www.theranger.co.uk
