The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus is expected to propose amendments today to two food safety laws that would require that the place of origin of ingredients in packaged and canned foods be stated on the labels.
Amid the scare sparked by melamine-tainted products from China, DPP legislators plan to introduce the draft amendments to the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法) and the Commodity Labeling Law (商品標示法), DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said.
The sanitation act only requires that food packages specify ingredients and their quantities, while the commodity law requires that the label state the place of origin of the final product.
“You only know where the product was assembled, processed or made. But you have no idea as to where the ingredients came from,” Ker said. “We need to make sure that consumers have more information on the food they buy.”
The amendments will be introduced tomorrow in the hope that the Procedure Committee will place them on the legislature’s agenda the following day, Ker said.
Ker said that as the amendments concerned public health, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus would not block them.
Meanwhile, Huang Kun-chang (黃焜璋), a senior specialist at the Department of Health, confirmed that three children had been diagnosed with kidney stones, the first possible local victims of Chinese baby formula contaminated with the toxic chemical melamine.
Among the 1,954 people who received free health examinations at special outpatient clinics in more than 20 hospitals run by the department on Saturday, three children were found to have kidney stones, Huang said in a telephone interview.
The three children, between the age of two and five, drank Chinese-made baby formula contaminated with melamine for more than a year, he said, adding it was highly likely the illnesses were caused by the tainted formula.
He said that the mother of one of the children — a two-year-old girl — was the Chinese spouse of a Taiwanese man and that she had fed the child with milk during a trip to China. The mothers of the other two sick children also lived in China, he said.
The food scare in Taiwan intensified early this month after it was found that 25 tonnes of contaminated milk powder had been imported from China.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JIMMY CHUANG
Also See: Delegation meets Beijing counterparts
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
DEFENDING DEMOCRACY: Taiwan shares the same values as those that fought in WWII, and nations must unite to halt the expansion of a new authoritarian bloc, Lai said The government yesterday held a commemoration ceremony for Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, joining the rest of the world for the first time to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Taiwan honoring V-E Day signifies “our growing connections with the international community,” President William Lai (賴清德) said at a reception in Taipei on the 80th anniversary of V-E Day. One of the major lessons of World War II is that “authoritarianism and aggression lead only to slaughter, tragedy and greater inequality,” Lai said. Even more importantly, the war also taught people that “those who cherish peace cannot