Something smells rotten in the State of Denmark...

  An amusing oddity was detected this morning by our News Watchdog scanning the Net to fetch you the latest. A major problem of smuggling is worrying the Customs departments of the E U--Garlic smuggling into the Community! Why criminals would want to smuggle garlic boggles the imagination, was it to conceal a cargo of hard drugs, I asked myself. But no, the stuff is being run across the border to avoid paying tax.
     It appears that China grows it in large quantities and sells it at knock-down prices abroad. To protect the local garlic growers in Italy, France etc. an import tax was slapped on `foreign` garlic of 9.6 percent plus 1200 Eur a tonne, if I have understood correctly. To avoid this tax, an industry has grown up, to import Chinese garlic into, for example, Denmark, where the tax doesn`t apply and then smuggle it into Sweden and thence the rest of the EU. Sound  amusing, but a container of garlic could be liable for 30,000Eur, so the financial implications are large.
   Still, I`m sure the Police and Douanes can sniff out this new threat to our struggling garlic-farmers and the trail should be easily detectable by specially-trained Garlic-hounds...

  Bye for now, going to check if my garlic stock has a yellow tinge!