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‘Happy Mobs’ seek safety in numbers

Staff from Tainan City’s Health Bureau check cans of Nestle brand milk powder for country of origin at a maternity goods store in Tainan on Friday. PHOTO: WU HSING-HUA, TAIPEI TIMES

Worried about melamine contamination and dissatisfied with the Department of Health, a group of social activist bloggers calling themselves “Happy Mobs” are pushing for more corporate and government transparency.

“It’s been weeks since the melamine scare first broke and the government has changed the tolerable limit for melamine quite a few times. But they never explained to us why the changes were made, why we decided to follow the EU standard or the Hong Kong standards and how everything was decided,” Cheng Kuo-wei (鄭國威), initiator of the campaign, told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview.

“We want safe food and we want to know how the government makes decisions,” he said.

“Although there’s a Government Information Disclosure Act [政府資訊公開法], it’s poorly executed,” he said. “I think the melamine scare is a good opportunity to push for more transparency.”

In a statement released by Happy Mobs, it asked the government to release “complete and clear records of all expert meetings — where the numbers came from and why some numbers were chosen but not others.”

“Although there’s a Government Information Disclosure Act, it’s poorly executed. I think the melamine scare is a good opportunity to push for more transparency.”

— Cheng Kuo-wei, Happy Mobs blogger

“We would like to urge the government to come up with a set of standard food testing procedures, not an ambiguous ‘non-detectable’ standard,” it said. “We would also like to ask the government to allow concerned civic groups to participate in meetings and the policy-making process.”

Meanwhile, Tseng Chao-ming (曾昭明), founder of Corporate Social Responsibility Taiwan, called on food companies to fulfill their responsibilities by making public detailed information about their products, including where all the raw materials come from.

However, unlike more conventional civic groups, members of Happy Mobs do not meet face-to-face to discuss issues — many of them do not even know who their peers are.

Instead, they use a forum-like online platform to plan actions or compose common statements.

Each member posts the statements on their own blogs or forwards them to friends via e-mail.

So far, 657 blogs are participating in the campaign against melamine, which is just the latest issue Happy Mobs has taken on.

“We are a group of bloggers who are concerned about public issues. We’ve actually initiated other campaigns for the preservation of Losheng Sanatorium and environmental issues, and advocated support for the Green Party Taiwan [in the legislative elections],” said Daphne Hu (胡慕情), one of the bloggers.

“The advantage of an online campaign is that it is not limited by place or time and is a good way for those who may not have other channels to express their thoughts,” Hu said.

“I don’t expect the government to respond to us right now, but we want to accumulate enough sway to show the government what the public is thinking,” she said. “And if the government doesn’t want to listen to us, we may just have to solve that with a change of government.”

Happy Mobs discussions are open to the public and accessible by joining groups.google.com.tw/group/happymobs.
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