Starting on Tuesday, a nationwide inspection will be launched in which a total of 1,000 beef, pork, duck and goose products will be randomly tested to see whether they contain banned leanness-enhancing drugs.
The announcement was made following a meeting hosted by the Department of Health (DOH) with local health authorities.
According to the DOH, the central government will join forces with local governments in carrying out the nationwide inspections in locations such as supermarkets, traditional markets and restaurants. Of the 1,000 items, the authorities will randomly inspect 500 beef products, 400 pork products and 100 duck and goose meat products, it said.
Meanwhile, the inter-ministerial task force established to deal with the latest food safety crisis decided at its first meeting yesterday to tighten border inspections of beef products.
From next week, all beef products from companies previously discovered to have imported products containing banned leanness-enhancing drugs will be examined by customs shipment-by-shipment, said Vice Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), who heads the task force.
Beef importers that have clean records will have just 5 percent of their shipments examined, he said.
Jiang also instructed relevant agencies to ascertain whether the stricter measures would cause problems in relations between Taiwan and its trade partners under the WTO framework.
Addressing the alleged use of banned leanness enhancers by local farmers, Jiang said the Ministry of Justice would assist the Council of Agriculture in amending the Veterinary Drugs Control Act (動物用藥品管理法) by increasing the penalties for offenders and mandating that their names be published.
The harsher steps came in the wake of recent discoveries of the additives in some brands of imported beef, reports that some locally produced pork products have also been found to contain banned drugs and outbreaks of a highly pathogenic strain of the H5N2 bird flu virus in chicken farms in central and southern Taiwan.
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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