Russian Federation Destroys Smuggled Western Food, Prompting Public Outcry

Pic: ReutersMOSCOW: Russian Federation launched Thursday a controversial campaign to destroy tonnes of Western food from gourmet cheeses to fruit and vegetables smuggled into the crisis-hit country, defying a storm of criticism.

The move, however, has raised protests in Russian Federation, with people signing a petition urging the government to instead donate the food to the poor suffering through the country’s vicious recession.

President Vladimir Putin supported this initiative.

Russian Federation has bulldozed a pile of Western-produced cheese and tonnes of other foodstuffs imported in violation of sanctions.

The Kremlin, hoping to stem the flow of banned products by raising the costs for those involved in contraband, has ignored the public outcry.

The national agricultural oversight agency, Rosselkhznadzor, said a total of 290 metric tons of banned imported fruit and vegetables were destroyed around the country on Thursday, along with 29.3 metric tons of animal products.

One of the first batches of food to be eliminated was 10 tonnes of cheese in Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine. Moscow slapped the embargo on Western produce, from Polish apples to Spanish ham, a year ago.

Both the sanctions and the imports ban were extended for another year in June.

After the fall of Communism, Russians developed a strong appetite in the 1990s for Western food imports, from cheap U.S. chicken quarters to fine French cheeses for the newly wealthy.

Whisking products into Russian Federation on fake documents has also reportedly taken place.

Timur Nigmatullin, an analyst at investment holding Finam, says that banned goods are continuing to leak across the Russian border principally because of the legal framework on which the Eurasian Union – the Russia-led economic organization of which Belarus, Kazakhstan and Armenia are also members – is based.

Defending the ban, Putin said it helped create incentives for local agricultural producers. “Major distributors who in the past bought from Holland and Italy now feel this will last”, said John Kopiski, a British-born farmer who produces cheese and meat in Krutovo, about 140 miles east of Moscow.

A class photo with Vladimir Putin, dated 1966, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Critics of the government, however, say the shortages are hurting the consumers amid a rise in prices.

The latest decree will allow officials from the Federal Customs Service, the agricultural watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor and the health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor to decide what they want to seize.

With annual food price inflation running at over 20 percent, public indignation has been deepened by Russian media reports that the agriculture ministry was tendering to buy “mobile food crematoria” to speed up the destruction.