Seattle Newspaper Exposes Widespread “Honey Laundering”

“A far cry from the innocent image of Winnie the Pooh with a paw stuck in the honey pot, the international honey trade has become increasingly rife with crime and intrigue,” claims a recent Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle P-I)investigative report on the widespread practice of “honey laundering,” the illegal practice of transshipping products through other countries to avoid U.S. import fees, protective
tariffs or taxes. In addition, the global market is “plagued by foreign hucksters and shady importers who rip off conscientious U.S. packers with honey diluted with sugar water or corn syrup – or worse, tainted with pesticides or antibiotics.”

Seattle P-I allegedly found that (i) “tens of thousands of pounds of honey entering the U.S. each year come from countries that raise few bees and have no record of producing honey for export”; (ii) “only a small fraction [of honey] is inspected, and seizures and arrests remain rare”; and (iii) “[t]he feds haven’t adopted a legal definition of honey, making it difficult for enforcement agents to keep bad honey off the shelves.” The article also highlighted a series of import alerts issued for Chinese honey that contained the highly toxic antibiotic chloramphenicol as well as iprofloxacin and enrofloxacin, which are prohibited by FDA in food products. Chinese beekeepers first started using the antibiotics in 1997 after bacteria infected hundreds of thousands of their hives, notwithstanding the Ministry of Agriculture’s 2005 ban on chloramphenicol in food production. See Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 29 and 30, 2008.