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from the it's-enough-to-make-you-sick dept.
Nigeria has seized over 100 bags of plastic rice smuggled into the country, where prices of the staple food are skyrocketing ahead of the Christmas and New Year holidays.
[...] The rice is suspected of having been smuggled or illegally shipped in from China through Lagos port, a senior customs official in Nigeria's commercial hub told AFP.
The 50-kilo bags branded "Best Tomato Rice," had no date of manufacture and were intercepted Monday in the Ikeja area of the sprawling city, the official said on condition of anonymity.
"We have done a preliminary analysis of the plastic rice. After boiling, it was sticky and only God knows what would have happened if people consumed it," Ikeja area customs controller Mohammed Haruna was quoted as saying.
Nigeria has banned rice imports as it seeks to boost local production.
Source: teleSUR
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:42PM
How much does it cost to make plastic rice? Isn't it cheaper to grow real rice? Unless there's a warehouse full of substandard plastic that is going to be trashed anyway, I can't imagine anyone going to the effort and expense to make fake rice. The only way I can see this being "profitable" is the fake rice manufacturer had a subsidy from government. China? That makes little sense. Despite all the scandals that have come out of China, the government seems to be uninvolved in this kind of craziness.
This didn't really add up for me the first time I read it, and the disclaimer that has been added since makes me an unbeliever. Propaganda.
(Score: 2, Informative) by C R Johnson on Saturday December 24 2016, @04:24PM
It just may be depending on the rice variety simulated and the plastic used. Bulk rice on Alibaba is anywhere from $0.25 to $1.00 per Kg, while ABS plastic pellets run from $0.50 per Kg. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through however. If you are going to smuggle plastic which costs about the same, why not just smuggle real rice?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:01PM
Yeah doesn't make sense to me. Seems more expensive to make fake rice. Look at the per ton prices: http://www.thairiceexporters.or.th/price_eng.html [thairiceexporters.or.th]
There's a cost in making plastic look like rice and most cheap plastic when boiled in water stay hard or if they become soft they don't get sticky. If you make fake plastic rice you would be selling it as plastic rice for higher prices for display purposes or similar, not trying to pass it off as the real thing.
As for making other stuff look like rice (especially stuff that would become sticky after boiling like starch) that seems even more expensive. Just wholesale starch alone is already similar to rice prices, imagine the cost of processing it so it looks like rice. If it was so easy and cheap to turn starch into fake rice, poor people would be eating it as a staple instead of real rice.
(Score: 2) by blackhawk on Sunday December 25 2016, @12:37AM
It's worth remembering that China acts as the world's garbage bin for dumping and recycling of plastic. Some smart person realised that a lot of the ships returning to China were empty, so they started to charge for taking away the excess tons of plastic from the US / etc and "recycling" it.
They don't need to make high grade pellets for production purposes - they could be simply melting down tons of transparent plastic bags and mixing the result with a little starch to make it sticky. Given they are being paid for the recycling costs, it could still be profitable to do this and sell the result as food to some country with enough corruption to not care what you do to it's people.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Tuesday December 27 2016, @05:48AM
Another possibility is that someone ended up with a bunch of small plastic pellets that were originally for some other purpose, and realized that they looked enough like rice to be able to try to pass them off a such to make a few bucks. It may be the "rice" was free if the plastic pellets were going to be trashed otherwise.