Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislators and the Consumers' Foundation asked Council of Agriculture (COA) officials yesterday to reconsider a proposal to relax standards for organic produce.
"Why do consumers pay higher prices for organic? To guarantee that the fruit and vegetables they're eating are free from chemicals," TSU Legislator Tseng Tsahn-deng (曾燦燈), said. "But now the COA wants to allow produce tainted with agrichemicals to be sold as organic."
There are four certifying bodies for organic produce. All have a zero-tolerance standard -- any produce testing positive for agrichemicals has its organic status revoked.
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
The COA is mooting a new legal standard for organic produce certification allowing produce to be certified organic despite having traces of agrichemical present, as long as concentrations are less than five percent of the legal safety limit for conventionally-grown produce.
The COA said the maximum allowable limit protects farmers who do not use pesticides and herbicides but cannot avoid small amounts of contamination from nearby farms.
"Our farmers do not have the luxury of 30m buffer zones between farms," Agriculture and Food Agency Director-General Huang Yu-tsai (
Huang also cited analogous rules for organic certification in the US allowing small amounts of chemical residue. Japan and the EU, however, do not allow any detectable levels of chemical residue on organic produce.
"It's a step backwards," foundation vice chairman Hsieh Tien-jen (
"Let's not punish farmers whose field are contaminated by neighbors. Let's help them to do a better job isolating their crops," he said. "But if crops test positive for agrichemicals, they shouldn't be considered organic."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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