“Locking in Freshness for Export, Locking in Market Share”
Shantou boasts an extensive coastline, a dense water network, abundant sunlight, and sufficient rainfall. Its locally produced agricultural and food products—such as aquatic products, laver, beef meatballs, and fish meatballs—boast unique flavors and are well-received in overseas markets.
To ensure the smooth import and export of perishable fresh agricultural and food products, Shantou Customs has launched the “Green Initiative for Agricultural and Food Product Customs Clearance”. It has established a “Green Channel” for local inspection of imported and exported agricultural and food products, implemented a “5+2” round-the-clock appointment-based inspection and customs clearance system, and combined it with customs clearance facilitation measures such as priority inspection and fast inspection & release. These efforts are aimed at fully ensuring the safe and convenient customs clearance of agricultural and food products.
“The shelf life of finished frozen beef meatballs is only 7 days. The customs ‘Green Channel’ achieves ‘zero delay’ and ‘zero detention’ throughout the process, maximizing the preservation of the product’s flavor,” said Zhang Chuanjie, manager of Chenghai Chaoshi Quick-Frozen Food Factory in Shantou City.
Since 2022, Chenghai Customs has conducted 29 research visits to Shantou Jinping Food Chamber of Commerce and enterprises across Chaoshan. Focused on expanding the export of characteristic agricultural and food products such as aquatic products, braised lion-head geese, and beef meatballs, it has listened to the development demands of enterprises and solved 26 pressing and long-standing issues for them.
At the same time, in response to the demand that most agricultural and food products within its jurisdiction are supplied to the Hong Kong market, the customs keeps track of enterprises’ export plans in real time. It leverages its advantages in safety risk monitoring of exported animal-derived food and the testing capabilities of its in-jurisdiction laboratories to realize “one-stop” testing for exported products and full-chain traceability of food supplied to Hong Kong.
“Locking in freshness for export has also ‘locked in’ the overseas market for agricultural and food products. Data shows that from January to July 2022, Shantou Customs supervised the export of 25,000 tons of agricultural and food products supplied to Hong Kong, a year-on-year increase of 10.2%.”
