CHICAGO, June 9 – The Chicago Tribune reports that executives of Alfred L. Wolff Inc., a prominent honey importer based in Germany, have been arrested and held by U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement agents for illegally conspiring to import honey from China.

The honey laundering case is note worthy as it involves apparent criminal activities by American-based, rather than Chinese businessmen in trying to ensure that cheap product reaches the States, in what is regarded as a rising trend of American commercial disobedience towards government imposed anti-dumping measures. In the Wolff case, honey was said to have been purchased from China, shipped to Russia, mixed with Russian honey, and then shipped to Chicago labeled as pure Russian honey – which does not carry anti-dumping penalties. Other countries Wolff have been alleged to have used as secondary destinations to get around the U.S. Department of Commerce’s anti-dumping fees on Chinese honey include Australia, the Ukraine, Poland and Singapore. The origin of honey can be detected by a signature chemical analysis that identifies soil residues within the honey itself, and once nine containers of Russian honey were actually identified as being of Chinese origin, the executives concerned were apprehended and are now being held at Chicago’s Metropolitan Correction Center, though they have yet to be formally charged.

The incentive to bend the rules over anti-dumping legislation is certainly there. Sixty percent of the United States annual consumption of honey is imported, according to the American National Honey Board, and China has traditionally been the world’s largest exporter, mainly through state-owned enterprises that purchase honey from small farmers around the nation and then collectively process it. It’s big business – once the U.S. government imposed anti-dumping measures on China in 2001, Russian exports to the United States soared from 130,000 pounds in 2003 to 7.3 million pounds in just three years – far beyond Russia’s actual honey production capabilities.

Several things stand out concerning the issue, not least the actual effectiveness of Commerce Department anti-dumping measures against China subsequently encouraging illegal transshipments to occur. Additionally, the obvious abilities of American businessmen to organize global supply chain structures is thus legally diminished as the demand of the American consumer for cheap product brings them into conflict with their own government. Surely one also has to question how effective the U.S. Customs are at policing the issue on behalf of the Department of Commerce and what sense anti-dumping measures of this sort actually make.

Honey laundering, we suspect, is just the tip of a very large U.S. consumer driven rebuttal of the nation’s anti-dumping measures affecting hundreds of commodities. If so, quite how the U.S. Department of Commerce balances its policy of imposing anti-dumping on certain Chinese products against the consumer’s desire to have them is a matter that remains, it would seem, an American, rather than U.S.-China conflict.