A ban on imports of selected agricultural products from China remains in place, a Council of Agriculture official said yesterday, after it was discovered that frozen vegetables imported from Japan had been produced in China.
Chang Shu-hsien, head of the council’s International Department, said the government had not eased the ban and would continue to crack down on Chinese agricultural products smuggled into the country.
Council officials said importing Chinese vegetables through Japan did not violate the ban as long as the vegetables contained in the packages were not on the list of banned items. They did not, however, say whether the packages from Japan had contained banned items.
After tainted milk powder that made thousands of babies sick in China found its way into Taiwan, scaring consumers, the discovery of Japanese-branded vegetables originating from China has prompted questions about their safety and marketing.
Hsiao Tung-ming (蕭東銘), head of the Bureau of Food Sanitation, said there was no cause for alarm.
“Many brands may come from Japan, but their farms are in the US or China. Basically, importing these companies’ products into Taiwan means that they meet Taiwan’s regulations,” Hsiao said.
Meanwhile, one Japanese brand selling frozen vegetable brands for three to four times the price of local vegetables has been improperly labeling its products and misleading customers, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported.
The importer’s label in Chinese did not identify the country of origin and was placed over a label on the original packaging that said the vegetables were from China, the report said.
As the packaging had information in Japanese and the label in Chinese identified the supplier as a Japanese company, consumers could assume the vegetables were from Japan, the paper reported.
The council said the ban on specific Chinese products had not been relaxed, nor had food safety standards eased.
To help enforce the regulations, the council has deployed a team of experts who assist customs authorities in determining the countries of origin of suspicious agricultural imports, Chang said.
Chang said that as of the end of last month, 1,417 Chinese agricultural products could be imported and 830 products were banned.
Among frozen foods, potatoes, sweet corn, red beans, soybeans, green asparagus and bamboo shoots may not be imported.
Frozen peas, beans, spinach, white asparagus, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower and mushrooms are permitted, the council said.
As for fresh vegetables, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, cucumbers, peas, beans and soybeans are all banned, the council said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not