Market watchdog to tighten fight against Chinese contrabands
Market watchdog to tighten fight against Chinese contrabands
With fake and copycat products beginning to be smuggled from China to Vietnam en masse, the Market Management Department said it will join hands with relevant agencies to detect and curb such contraband from entering the country.
Trinh Van Ngoc, deputy chief of the department, said a new force of inspectors has recently been set up to oversee the phenomenon.
The department will pay a close watch on several commodities such as firecrackers, beer and alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, food, and confectionaries, Ngoc said.
Ngoc also admitted that while local manufacturers are boosting production to embrace the coming Tet holidays, which fall in late January, smugglers are also prepared to bring the illicit products into the country.
Market watchdog agencies nationwide have detected 67,000 smuggling cases in the year to October, while the number of goods made in China and illegally imported to Vietnam has been on the rise in the last few months.
“Chinese goods dominate the smuggled products partly because of loose checks at border gates,” he said.
The smuggled products do not only harm local manufacturers in terms of economic damage, but also put consumers at several health risks, he added.
Ngoc said Chinese goods can easily flood Vietnamese markets because they are not taxed, thus bearing throwaway prices.
Meanwhile, some products that are made in China are sold with fake labels of Vietnamese brands to dupe consumers.
“It’s really hard to detect this scam. Even I cannot tell the Chinese goods from Vietnamese ones,” he admitted.
It is also difficult to catch the traders red-handed when they swap the Chinese labels with the fake Vietnamese ones, he added.
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