The Executive Yuan’s Food Safety Office was inaugurated on Wednesday as the nation continues to be roiled by the apparently never-ending numbers of products being pulled from store shelves because of flawed ingredients and manufacturing improprieties.
Just yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that 71 items found to contain animal feed-grade beef tallow — all but 12 of which had been produced by Cheng I Food Co (正義股份) — must be pulled from stores by midnight tonight, though 47 of the Cheng I products were already subject to a recall order issued earlier this month. The announcement was a reminder of the enormity of the task facing the new office.
The office is supposed to coordinate the central government’s response to and investigation of food-related violations, integrating the efforts of the interior, economic affairs, health and welfare and justice ministries, as well as the Council of Agriculture. The launch of the office is a big step forward, but several outstanding issues could cripple the new body before it has a chance to prove itself, including staffing, the fact that too many agencies are involved in different aspects of food safety and the government’s reluctance to give up its reliance on ad hoc crisis-response measures.
Inter-ministerial coordination is crucial, but what is far more important is more feet on the ground in the form of inspectors who can monitor raw material purchases and manufacturing practices, laboratory technicians to conduct product testing and forensic accountants to monitor the endless reams of paperwork and countless computer files.
The Food Safety Office should be professionally staffed and well-equipped to conduct research, testing and certification of food products, and to speak as the central authority when a food crisis arises, but instead it has a score or so of staffers transferred from various ministries that have some hand in food safety and the council, and their role appears to be designed to be largely paper-pushing. Meanwhile, its leadership already have full-time jobs elsewhere — from Minister of Health and Welfare Chiang Been-huang (蔣丙煌), who will supervise the office, to the two deputy directors: Food and Drug Administration Risk Management Director Tsai Shu-chen (蔡淑貞) and Tsai Meng-lun (蔡孟倫), an adviser to the Executive Yuan’s Department of the Interior, Health, Welfare and Labor.
Chiang has said his priority is to “rebuild the country’s food safety system as well as its image as a food kingdom,” but he has several equally pressing matters to attend to at the ministry and cannot spend all his time on building a better food-inspection system, even if that is where his expertise lies and what the nation desperately needs.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) previously said the new office would “mimic the operation of crisis intervention teams,” but that is exactly the wrong approach.
Firefighting is much sexier than probing through factory storage units and production lines, doing bookkeeping and conducting rounds of lab testing. Crises and disasters bring media attention and television interviews, while the actual work of drafting legislation and regulations to ensure the comprehensive scrutiny of every step in the nation’s food chain or conducting that scrutiny and enforcing the rules does not make for good photo opportunities.
Taiwan does not need more crisis intervention teams. It needs effective preventive measures.
The trouble is, the central government, legislators, local politicians and even the public have been reluctant to embrace the idea that prevention is better than a cure, a notion that should be applied to a host of problems facing the nation, not just food crises. Taiwan can ill afford to retain this mindset.
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