The relevant amendments to the Tax Code and other normative acts were adopted at the last sitting of the Moldovan Parliament, promulgated and published in Monitorul Oficial.
With this decision, the Moldovan authorities, in fact, recognized the fact of deficit on the country’s market of pork for industrial processing and the need to compensate it at the expense of imports. The deficit was formed as a result of forced slaughter in March this year more than 120 thousand pigs due to African swine fever on the two largest pig farms in Moldova. As a result, the Moldovan meat market was short of about 11 thousand tons of pork.
For some time, the deficit of commercial pork was compensated by importing live pigs from the European Union for slaughtering and processing. This option of solving the problem was considered unreliable and even dangerous in the epizootic context by some operators of the meat industry of RM. At that time, many European countries were in the “red zone” due to ASF and foot-and-mouth disease. Therefore, the transit of live pigs through them to RM was fraught with new cases of spreading dangerous diseases.
After numerous appeals of the Association of Patronage of Meat Processing Industries PÎIPC to the Government and Parliament with the demand to liberalize (for the period of ASF elimination) more reliable and safe imports of frozen pork, the authorities of the country allowed duty-free supplies of these products, limited in terms of volume and time.
At the same time, PÎIPC representatives note that they requested duty-free imports of at least 3,000 tons of frozen parts (neck, beat, loin, etc.) of pork carcasses. But, for unclear reasons and without proper justification, only 1.2 thousand tons of frozen pork were allowed preferential imports and only until October 31.
This “preferential quota” will be distributed according to the well-known principle of “first-come-first-served”. Obviously, the first to get the largest volumes of imported pork will be those operators of the meat market of RM who have more money.
