Wanting cheap prices, businesses imported more than 877,000 tons of wheat contaminated with dangerous grass

Ms. Tran Thi Nhin - Deputy Head of the Plant Quarantine Sub-Department of Region 1, said that the large volume of goods has exceeded the monitoring and handling capacity of the on-site staff. Over the past 5 months, the Plant Quarantine Sub-Department of Region 1 has sent 4 official dispatches requesting the Plant Protection Department to increase the force from other units to support the handling.

“Each proposal has 10 quarantine officers to support, but businesses have dozens, hundreds of receiving points. We have to work hard day and night to ensure control of all shipments, but some businesses refuse to cooperate in implementing the quarantine process,” Ms. Nhinh shared.

Thistle

A representative of the Plant Quarantine Sub-Department of Region 1 said that over the past several months, the Sub-Department has mobilized dozens of additional quarantine officers at Vat Cach Port (Hai Phong City) to strengthen supervision of the loading and unloading of wheat from ships to the port. Since discovering wheat shipments contaminated with thistle, the quarantine force has been working at full capacity, increasing manpower to control all shipments, preventing thistle from entering and spreading into the environment.

The risk of weeds spreading into the environment is very high, so instead of being scooped directly into the container, wheat must now be put through a funnel to minimize the wheat and thistle flowers falling and spreading into the environment. On the ground, quarantine officers also require tarps to be spread and the entire loading area cordoned off. After each day of loading, port workers clean up, use industrial vacuum cleaners to clean the area, and then burn the waste suspected of containing thistle flowers.

Mr. Nguyen Ba Tuan - inspectorThe Plant Quarantine Sub-Department of Region 8 (located in Lao Cai) was dispatched by the Plant Protection Department to Hai Duong to inspect animal feed production enterprises. He shared: "To supervise the entire process of removing thistle grass, I have to work as a worker importing goods into the warehouse. The bags containing impurities in wheat must be personally taken away for destruction, and workers cannot handle them themselves, to prevent them from burying them or dumping them into the environment, which will spread thistle grass into the environment."

Assessing the situation of imported wheat infected with thistle, Mr. Le Son Ha - Head of Plant Quarantine Department, Plant Protection Department, said that the number of violating shipments has not decreased but has tended to increase, which shows that businesses have not really cooperated to control the source of goods. According to statistics, by the end of October, about 1.8 million tons of imported wheat to Vietnam were infected with thistle.

Thistle is now present in 40 countries around the world, each flower contains 5,000 seeds, if a flower is released into the environment, the risk of spreading and spreading will be very high. Around the world, many countries have enacted laws to ban this type of grass because it has the potential to harm and affect 27 different plant species.

Regarding this issue, Mr. Hoang Trung - Director of the Plant Protection Department informed that the Department continuously sent written notices to the plant quarantine agencies of Australia, Canada, Russia, and the United States about the situation of wheat shipments infected with thistle. Russia and the United States have actively coordinated to completely handle the shipments infected with thistle in December 2018, while strictly controlling the domestic export quarantine stage.

According to Mr. Trung, handling thousands of wheat shipments is currently an overwhelming task for the quarantine industry as the number of violating shipments continues to increase. The problem here is that importing enterprises are greedy for cheap, low-quality goods and do not strictly control the source of raw materials.

To completely handle this situation, Mr. Trung affirmed that in the coming months, if the situation of violations in shipments contaminated with thistle does not decrease and tends to increase, the Plant Protection Department will request the re-export of violating shipments, and at the same time recommend stopping the import of wheat from countries with many shipments found to contain thistle to prevent the risk of contamination into Vietnam.

1.8million tons of imported wheat infected with thistle (by the end of October 2018)

Thistle is now available at40countries in the world...Each flower of grass contains5,000seed,The risk of spreading is very high.

Many countries have included thistle in the list of quarantine objects of group 1 - a particularly dangerous group; If thistle infests Vietnam, there is a great risk of losing the agricultural export market when countries impose a ban if thistle is found mixed in the shipment.