More than 80 percent of respondents believed the government should shoulder most of the responsibility for failing to monitor food additives companies, according to a poll released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
DPP poll director Chen Chun-lin (陳俊麟) told a press conference that 81.7 percent of respondents believed the government should be held accountable for the current food scare because it should have had a system in place to -inspect the -products of food additives companies.
The poll also found that 52.7 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the government’s response to the scare, while 41 percent said they were satisfied, Chen said.
The poll found that 68.5 percent of respondents said they no longer have confidence in products marked with the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) seal issued by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, because some products with GMP certification have been found to contain illegal chemical additives. Just over a quarter, 26.8 percent, said they still had confidence in GMP-marked products.
When asked to comment on the Department of Health’s decision to wait until last month to alert the public to the illegal food additive problem, even though the contamination was first discovered in March, 58.1 percent of respondents said they believed the government should have told the public the truth as soon as it knew it, while 33.6 percent felt the government only wanted to be careful in dealing with the incident.
The poll found 77.2 percent of respondents were concerned about their and their families’ health in light of the current food scare, while 20.5 percent said they were not worried.
A vast majority (83.1 percent) said they were also concerned whether their children were being fed unsafe food in school lunches or in food bought from vending machines. Only 14.3 percent said they were not concerned.
The poll, conducted on Wednesday and Thursday with 1,081 samples, has a margin of error of 3 percent.
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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