Jessica Leeder, “Honey laundering: The sour side of nature’s golden sweetener,” The Globe and Mail, January 5, 2011
“As crime sagas go, a scheme rigged by a sophisticated cartel of global traders
has all the right blockbuster elements: clandestine movements of illegal
substances through a network of co-operatives in Asia, a German conglomerate,
jet-setting executives, doctored laboratory reports, high-profile
takedowns and fearful turncoats,” opens Globe and Mail food reporter Jessica
Leeder in this exposé tracing the honey market from Chinese beekeepers,
who are allegedly “notorious” for using banned antibiotics and diluting their
products, to North America, where they are “baked into everything from
breakfast cereals to cookies and mixed into sauces and cough drops.”
Leeder claims that imported honey sold in North America “is more likely
to be stamped as Indonesian, Malaysian or Taiwanese, due to a growing
multimillion dollar laundering system designed to keep the endless supply
of cheap and often contaminated Chinese honey moving into the U.S., where
tariffs have been implemented to staunch the flow and protect its own
struggling industry.” She follows the route of Chinese honey through one
German conglomerate, Alfred L. Wolff GmbH (ALW), accused in U.S. courts of
“networking with Chinese honey producers and brokers desperate to unload cheap products.” According to Leeder’s research, “In exchange for contracts with ALW, honey brokers agreed to move Chinese-origin honey to Russia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
Leeder notes, however, that a recent sting operation targeting ALW has done little to curb the number of “suspect” imports from countries that do not actually produce honey. “It’s kind of like they’re running a car-stealing ring,” one domestic beekeeper was quoted as saying. “You catch the guy stealing the car and put him out of business. But the guy that’s laundering, the chop shop or the packer, he just finds another supplier. I think it’s going to keep getting worse until we catch a couple of big ones, give them a little jail time.”
