One doesn’t have to look very hard to turn up some stomach-churning facts about the nation’s food safety standards.
Reports emerged last week that vegetables imported from Japan were actually from China. The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported that Chinese product information had been covered with Japanese labels on packages of the pricey frozen vegetables, leading customers to believe they were paying high prices for high quality.
But authorities were unfazed. The Bureau of Food Sanitation said consumers shouldn’t lose sleep over mislabeled products because imports pass inspection and meet standards to enter the country.
That reassurance sounded like a bad joke when King Car Industrial Co pulled eight of its products from shelves nationwide over the weekend. Tests revealed the products — seven kinds of instant coffee and one kind of instant soup — all contained melamine. The products did not contain powdered dairy ingredients and therefore had not been targeted by the Department of Health (DOH).
King Car’s decision to have its products tested was apparently voluntary, so credit goes to the company for opening the eyes of the authorities to potential contamination in non-dairy products. The revelation that milk-free ingredients from China also contained melamine led the department to widen its testing of products from China to include those with powdered protein.
However, King Car first imported tainted non-dairy creamer from China last December, and part of the batch has already disappeared from store shelves. While there is no cause for panic — not a single instance of illness in Taiwan has been linked to melamine — there is certainly cause for concern that the situation was allowed to occur at all.
The purpose of food safety standards is to keep toxic items off our dinner plates. For that reason, assurances that customers probably didn’t consume enough melamine to immediately become sick is beside the point. Any melamine content in food is inexcusable.
Likewise, with the department standing by its decision not to recall all tainted products that have already hit stores — presumably because of the losses this would entail for struggling food companies — the public can be forgiven if it has lost confidence in food safety controls.
Chinese products have been hit by scandal after scandal in the past year, with possibly the most shocking news being that officials swept reports of the tainted milk under the carpet one week before the Beijing Olympic Games.
With a staggering 53,000 children confirmed sick from toxic milk powder and more than 12,000 still hospitalized, it is the Chinese public that is paying the distressing price of dirty deals between authorities and companies. That is a breach of trust that all of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) promises and Premier Wen Jiabao’s (溫家寶) visits to hospitals will be hard pressed to heal.
We can expect to see more heads to roll in China, but punishing a few is no substitute for overhauling a corrupt and cynical system.
In Taiwan, meanwhile, Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers have called for resignations to shoulder responsibility. But replacing officials alone will not guarantee results, especially as some melamine-tainted products may have been left on store shelves. Without overhauling systems for inspecting imported goods, the government’s message to consumers is: “Watch what you eat, because we’ve done all we have to.”
When US budget carrier Southwest Airlines last week announced a new partnership with China Airlines, Southwest’s social media were filled with comments from travelers excited by the new opportunity to visit China. Of course, China Airlines is not based in China, but in Taiwan, and the new partnership connects Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport with 30 cities across the US. At a time when China is increasing efforts on all fronts to falsely label Taiwan as “China” in all arenas, Taiwan does itself no favors by having its flagship carrier named China Airlines. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is eager to jump at
The muting of the line “I’m from Taiwan” (我台灣來欸), sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), during a performance at the closing ceremony of the World Masters Games in New Taipei City on May 31 has sparked a public outcry. The lyric from the well-known song All Eyes on Me (世界都看見) — originally written and performed by Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) — was muted twice, while the subtitles on the screen showed an alternate line, “we come here together” (阮作伙來欸), which was not sung. The song, performed at the ceremony by a cheerleading group, was the theme
Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised eyebrows recently when he declared the era of American unipolarity over. He described America’s unrivaled dominance of the international system as an anomaly that was created by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Now, he observed, the United States was returning to a more multipolar world where there are great powers in different parts of the planet. He pointed to China and Russia, as well as “rogue states like Iran and North Korea” as examples of countries the United States must contend with. This all begs the question:
In China, competition is fierce, and in many cases suppliers do not get paid on time. Rather than improving, the situation appears to be deteriorating. BYD Co, the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer by production volume, has gained notoriety for its harsh treatment of suppliers, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability. The case also highlights the decline of China’s business environment, and the growing risk of a cascading wave of corporate failures. BYD generally does not follow China’s Negotiable Instruments Law when settling payments with suppliers. Instead the company has created its own proprietary supply chain finance system called the “D-chain,” through which
RSS