The US will withhold support for Taiwan’s accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) if the lingering dispute over a ban on imports of US beef containing trace amounts of ractopamine remains unresolved, a former senior director for East Asian affairs on the US National Security Council said yesterday.
If key economic actors in the US feel that Taipei is not playing by the rules concerning food imports, Washington will not support Taiwan’s accession to organizations such as the TPP, said Jeffrey Bader, who became a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution after leaving the White House in April last year.
“They will lobby the [US] congress and they will say: ‘We should block Taiwan until Taiwan takes care of this issue.’ This is political reality,” Bader said in response to questions from the press after delivering a speech in Taipei titled “Obama’s Asia Policy” at an event organized by the Taipei Forum Foundation.
Bader said the dispute over US beef could easily be resolved “if [the] Taiwan[ese] government accepts the relevant scientific standards.”
“The beef issue has to do with scientific standards for making decisions about food imports and scientific standard is one of the key principles of the WTO [for] governing decisions. Every country is not supposed to make arbitrary decision on safety, but the safety decisions have to have scientific basis,” he said.
It Taiwan resolves the dispute, it would pave the way for a resumption of the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) talks and the US would be much more willing to support Taiwan’s membership in the TPP, Bader said.
Bader said the beef issue would remain an economic issue and he did not think it would spill over to other aspects of US-Taiwan ties.
“But it’s a very important issue. President Ma [Ying-jeou (馬英九)] is trying to work it out,” Bader said.
At a separate setting, another former senior US official said the beef dispute should remain separate from bilateral trade talks.
The US and Taiwan would deal with important issues, whether it is the re-opening of talks under TIFA or US beef, former US deputy state secretary Richard Armitage said.
“But we shouldn’t make them together,” he said in an interview, stressing he is no longer a government official and that his is a personal view.
In response to a question on the beef issue, he said it had not come up during his meeting with Ma earlier in the day.
Armitage’s visit to Taiwan is aimed at developing a better understanding of Taiwan’s democracy and issues such as the Taiwan-China relationship, he said.
Additional reporting by staff writer and CNA
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