Reuters — China’s meat trade is celebrating the end of testing and disinfecting chilled and frozen foods for COVID-19, more than two years after Beijing started the controversial practice, adding substantial costs.
The State Administration for Market Regulation ceased testing chilled and frozen foods for COVID-19 from Jan. 8. It will also no longer require all imported chilled and frozen foods to enter centralized warehouses for disinfection and testing before they reach the domestic market.
The dropping of measures follows a similar announcement from the customs authority that it will stop testing cold-chain food arriving at the country’s ports.
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“This policy means we will have much lower cost and risk on both product storage and transportation,” said a Beijing-based meat importer that buys beef and pork from other countries.
Having imposed the world’s strictest COVID regime of lockdowns and relentless testing for three years, China reversed course this month toward living with the virus, though new infections have soared.
China started testing chilled and frozen food imports for COVID in 2020 after an outbreak of the disease in a wholesale market led authorities to believe the virus had spread from imported produce.
The practice was controversial with trade partners and significantly slowed the shipment of food to China, the world’s top buyer of meat and many other perishable goods.
