Canada’s top envoy to Taiwan has expressed the hope that Taipei will lift its ban on Canadian bone-in beef this year, a main topic on the agenda of bilateral trade talks in April.
“We have been working with Taiwan for some time to complete our beef [market] access,” Kathleen Mackay, who took over as executive director of the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei in September last year, said in a recent interview.
Although the beef issue is “moving along slowly,” she said she hopes the ban will be lifted this year.
Mackay’s remarks came after the government sent a delegation to Canada in September to inspect slaughterhouses and evaluate Canada’s request to allow imports of its bone-in beef.
Since Canada’s first case of mad cow disease in 2003, the North American country has made efforts to prove the safety of its beef, which is sold in most markets around the world, Mackay said, citing Japan and South Korea as examples.
“We are very comfortable with our food safety system and the beef that we are producing,” she said in her first exclusive interview with local media since taking up her position in Taiwan.
After Canada’s first outbreak of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Taiwan imposed a ban on beef from the country, but reopened its market to imports of boneless beef in 2007.
Asked about Canada’s request, the Food and Drug Administration of the Department of Health said it is still evaluating the matter and that cross-agency discussions and a review of Canadian beef must be carried out before a decision can be made.
Canadian beef imports to Taiwan declined from 2,680 tonnes in 2010 to 1,205 tonnes in 2011 and 386 tonnes last year, with its market share dropping from 2.6 percent to 1.3 percent to less than 1 percent respectively, the Canadian office said.
The beef issue is one of the topics that Canada is hoping to discuss during the annual Canada-Taiwan Economic Consultation, which is to be held in Ottawa in April, Mackay said. Other issues include investment promotion, an agreement on avoiding double taxation, and further cooperation in the science and technology sectors, she said.
On the possibility of signing a free-trade agreement (FTA) with Taiwan, Mackay said that this was not a top priority for the time being, adding that the issues of double taxation and an agreement to protect and promote foreign investment would have to be resolved first.
“At this point, I wouldn’t expect to see that [an FTA] immediately,” she said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods