MINISTER of Trade and Industry Rashid Mohamed Rashid this week visited Argentina, in order to promote trade between Cairo and Buenos Aires, especially boosting meat imports from this Latin American country, that has the best livestock in the world. Egypt previously imported cheap Brazilian frozen meat and then it switched to Indian meat. Unfortunately, both the Brazilian and Indian adventures failed, due to the corruption of some importers and employees at the Ministry of Agriculture who accompanied the importers to these markets to check up on the meat, before its shipment to Egypt. The importers paid for the employees' trips and gave them pocket money too, and most of these employees endorsed the deals without carefully checking that the meat was fit for human consumption. This meant that the Egyptian market was dumped with rotten meat or meat infected with the sarcocyst parasite. The holy fasting month of Ramadan, when food consumption goes up, is almost here, and the Egyptian Government is preparing to import livestock from Ethiopia and Australia. The Government has stopped conducting such deals directly through the Minister of Agriculture, resorting instead to private importers, which means we could have the same problem again – the importation of diseased cattle and camels that could seriously harm our local animal wealth. We need to ensure that only good-quality meat and livestock are imported. We don't need to change the importing countries, but rather the strategy for the importation and supervision of such deals. At the same time, the missions accompanying the importers to these foreign countries should be very strict about preventing shipments of infected meat and cattle reaching Egypt's ports. Most importantly, there should be tough punishments for any employees who break the rules, allowing improper deals to go ahead.
