I just now received this text from Taiwan government. Anyone else?
This text is not an emergency requiring urgent action, not applicable to many people, and unnecessary to use text.
Warning notice [Animal and plant epidemic] to prevent African swine fever, do not send meat to Taiwan for online shopping, offenders can be sentenced to 7 years in prison. If you return from abroad, do not bring meat products into the country. Offenders may be fined 1 million yuan. Agricultural Science and Technology Inspection Bureau 02-23431401 Type: Warning notice OKㄥ
Not really. This is a necessary measure as locals insist on bringing sausages, dried and cured meats from China, and most have been found to carry this dangerous pathogen. Moreover, the fine is unusually high…to try to deter this behavior. That it still doesn’t succeed is another story.
I was going post this alert here, asking what it is. Thanks @tango42 for translating so quickly.
What in the world does this mean, “do not send meat to Taiwan for online shopping?”
Do not operate an e-comm business in which you import meat that you then distribute to customers?
Do not purchase imported meat online?
Or something else entirely?
Just to show they are not joking, two guys, one Taiwanese, one Chinese, were fined that amount. Not only did they smuggled pork meat but it was infected.
Who cares? It’s a text. You can turn off alerts for it. I got it too, and forgot about it 3 minutes later since I’m not in the import/export business.
Bringing infected meat into the country can really fuck things up. If sending an alert threatening jail time stops even a little bit of that, then I’m fine with it.
Apparently this African Swine Flu is serious business! They’ve already culled more than 600,000 pigs in China since August, but it apparently hasn’t been enough and isn’t working.
Taiwan customs has reported a few cases of people illegally smuggling in pork products which were tested positive for the disease. A couple more were caught earlier this month. They were only fined NT$15,000!
