Organised gangs have a growing appetite for food crime

Organised gangs have a growing appetite for food crime
Mar 15th 2014 | From the print edition
GANGSTERS used to send their enemies to sleep with the fishes. Today they are more likely to mislabel the fishes and sell them at a profit. Organised criminals who have long trafficked drugs are diversifying into humdrum areas of commerce—particularly food, booze and cheap consumer goods.

The horsemeat scandal last year drew attention to food fraud. Such scams are not unusual. Some 22 tonnes of long-grain rice being sold as pricier Basmati were recently seized as part of an operation led by Interpol and Europol, respectively the world’s and Europe’s police agencies. In Worthing, in Sussex, trading standards officers spotted nearly 2,500 jars of honey that contained nothing but sugar syrup. Another scam, involving substituting a cheap species of white fish for a pricey one, is hard to spot once the fish has been flaked, breaded and fried. Others dilute expensive olive oil with low-cost soyabean oil. Criminals even sell counterfeit washing powder.
The ancient crime of bootlegging alcohol is reviving, too. The operation that caught the rice bandits also snared a lorry carrying over 17,000 litres of fake vodka worth £1m ($1.7m). That was probably not an isolated shipment. Criminal gangs import truckloads of cheap beer from places such as Belgium and sell it to small retailers without paying duty. HM Revenue and Customs estimates that beer smuggling costs the Treasury around £500m a year. Duty has not been paid on at least one in ten, and possibly one in five, of all cans and bottles of beer on sale in Britain, thinks the all-party parliamentary beer group.
This brand of crime is growing. In 2007 the Food Standards Agency set up a food-fraud database. That year it received 49 reports of food fraud. In 2013 it received 1,538. The scale and organisation required to produce fake food points to criminal groups. And this is no flash in the pan, reckons Huw Watkins of the Intellectual Property Office. Gangs are investing heavily in the machinery, raw materials and labour necessary to make fake food products.
Some crooks who once focused on drugs have switched to food, says Chris Vansteenkiste of Europol, partly thanks to the falling profitability of the former. The proportion of Britons reporting having taken drugs in the past year dropped from 11% in 1996 to 8% in 2012. Not everyone is a junkie, but everyone buys food and drink. Stagnant wages and unusually high inflation since the financial crisis have increased people’s hunger for bargains.
Perhaps most important for crooks, humdrum crime is safer. Penalties for hawking counterfeit biscuits are considerably lighter than those for smuggling drugs or guns. For some intellectual-property theft, such as ripping off DVDs, criminals might face ten years in prison, says Stuart Shotton of FoodChain Europe, a food-law consultancy. If there are no fears about safety, he reckons that six months is more likely for crimes involving food.
Criminals are less likely to be caught in any case. The Metropolitan Police, who deal with much of Britain’s organised crime, are less likely to investigate food crime than other kinds of offence, says Gary Copson, a former detective. Mr Copson, who was involved in a review of Britain’s food-supply networks ordered by the government after the horsemeat affair, compares Britain’s approach unfavourably with that of the Netherlands. The Dutch have a unit of 110 staff dedicated to investigating food crime; Britain has none.
Meanwhile, other controls weaken. In December another parliamentary group, the public accounts committee, noted that border police had given priority to passenger checks over other duties, including examining freight for illicit goods. Cuts to local government mean that the number of trading-standards officers is dropping. Worcester County Council proposes to slash spending on trading standards by 80% over the next three years. Britons can expect more corn fakes for breakfast.