The government proposal to allow the import of beef from the US with residue of the livestock feed additive ractopamine constitutes a “blank check,” the People First Party (PFP) said, adding that the policy would pave the way for the government to lift the ban on imports of residue-positive pork.
The Executive Yuan on March 5 said it was leaning toward lifting the ractopamine ban based on the principles of “allowing a safe level of ractopamine in beef, separating the permits for importing beef and pork, clearly labeling beef imports and excluding imports of internal organs.”
PFP legislative caucus whip Thomas Lee (李桐豪) told a press conference yesterday that the principles had proved to be “a bare-faced lie” because they had been overridden by the Executive Yuan’s proposed amendment to the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法).
“We are fed up with the President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration’s repeated lies,” he said. “The PFP calls on President Ma to come forward and explain his policy to the public.”
Although lawmakers opposed to lifting the ban on imports of beef containing ractopamine are seeking to revise the Act Governing Food Sanitation in such a way as to prevent the government from executing its policy, the Executive Yuan on Wednesday presented its own version of the revised law, which it said was based on the four principles.
The Executive Yuan’s proposal states that residue testing for --beta-agonists, a class of drugs to which ratopamine belongs, in brains, eyes, spinal cords, ground meat and the internal organs of locally produced and imported meats must be negative unless classified as meat products allowed to contain a safe level of residue by the Department of Health. It would also require all meat products to carry a label indicating country of origin.
The proposal would enable the Department of Health (DOH) to establish an allowable residue level without requiring it to conduct a risk assessment, would make it impossible to keep limits for ractopamine residue in beef and pork separate, and would fail to provide consumers with information about whether the product contains ractopamine and if so how much, Lee said.
In related developments, business representatives from the textile, plastic and machine industries and economic officials were invited by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to attend a press conference yesterday to call for a prompt solution to the US beef issue in order to resume the long-suspended trade talks with the US under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) platform.
“South Korea’s textile products are exempt from tariffs in EU and US markets as a result of the free-trade agreements they signed with South Korea, but Taiwan’s textile products are subject to a tariff of 12 percent and 15 percent, respectively,” Taiwan Hosiery Manufacturers’ Association chairman Wei Ping-chi (魏平祺) said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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