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Hairy crabs debate turns to fitness of inspection criteria

China has to rigorously inspect its exported products instead of taking Taiwan to task for adopting strict standards when inspecting hairy crab imports, Cabinet spokesman Shieh Jyh-wey (謝志偉) said yesterday.

Shieh was responding to remarks earlier the same day by a spokesman of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, Li Weiyi (李維一), who said that Taiwan's adoption of stringent inspection criteria for Chinese hairy rabs has made it impossible to export the crabs to Taiwan "in a normal manner."

If the two sides of the Taiwan Strait cannot reach an agreement on the inspection criteria, it is certain that Taiwanese won't be able to enjoy the delicious crabs this year, Li said.

RESPONSE

In response, Shieh said that China has been too lax with its product inspections and that Taiwan has to be on guard against imports that could pose a health risk to the public.

Shieh said a lot of the inspections of Chinese products "may seem strict at first but later turn out to be too lax."

The Department of Health (DOH) has tightened inspections on imports of hairy crabs from China and banned inbound tourists from bringing in Chinese hairy crabs after some crabs were found to contain traces of the banned antibiotic nitrofuran, a cancer-causing substance, during tests last year.

STRICT

The DOH has come up with a set of 16 inspection criteria for hairy crabs from China, which are stricter than the existing WTO inspection standards adopted by Chinese quarantine authorities.

DOH officials said that there have not yet been any applications from crab importers to bring the hairy crabs into Taiwan this year.
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