The Consumers’ Foundation yesterday said its campaign for a referendum on the government’s decision to import bone-in beef from the US had failed.
Foundation chairman Hsieh Tien-jen (謝天仁) said they had not been able to collect the 866,090 signatures needed to complete the second stage of a referendum proposal by yesterday’s deadline.
He warned, however, that the risk of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from US beef had grown as the US was increasing its presence in the local market.
The foundation began to push for a plebiscite on Nov. 1 last year after Taipei signed a protocol with the US on Oct. 22 agreeing to lift bans on imports of US bone-in beef, internal organs and ground beef.
Hsieh said the foundation, which was trying to reverse the policy by forcing the government to reopen negotiations with Washington, had collected 130,259 signatures within 18 days to meet the requirements to initiate a referendum proposal.
The signatures were presented to the Central Election Commission for review on Dec. 8, Hsieh said.
After verifying the signatures, the commission gave the foundation a green light on Feb. 10 to seek 866,090 sponsors for the proposal — or 5 percent of the eligible voters in the last presidential elections — within six months.
Hsieh said the foundation managed to collect only 80,000 sponsors by yesterday. He attributed the failure to waning public interest because of the three-month legislative debate over the policy, adding that some of the public believed the referendum had already passed.
Another reason for the failure, he said, is that the public wrongly thinks the health risks were diffused after the Legislative Yuan revised the law to prohibit imports of offal and ground beef.
Hsieh said people are reluctant to endorse the referendum proposal because they fear a failed referendum might encourage local and US authorities to sell US beef here more aggressively.
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