The government next year is to reward people who provide information on contaminated food being sold, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said on Monday, adding that the money would come from a Ministry of Health and Welfare food safety protection fund.
Jiang was responding to a question from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Ming-tsai (羅明才) on whether the government has earmarked funds for whistleblowers to improve food safety, given that many problems in recent years were disclosed after tip-offs from the public.
Jiang said that the ministry’s Food and Drug Administration has taken several steps to improve food safety, increasing staff by 181 people in recent years with plans to hire 70 more next year.
It has also increased the agency’s budget for next year to NT$976 million (US$32 million) from NT$862 million this year, he said.
As for rewards for whistleblowers, Jiang said the money has come from the ministry’s second reserve fund in recent years, but because of a shortage of funds this year, he will ask the ministry to apply for a reserve fund managed by the Executive Yuan to meet the shortfall.
Jiang said that the food safety protection fund was established in February based on the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) and will begin offering reward money to informants next year.
The government also plans to increase bonuses for whistleblowers and stiffen punishments meted out to law-breaking food companies, the premier said.
Local governments will be required to increase rewards for whistleblowers from the current 10 percent of a fine levied on a violator to at least 20 percent of the fine, Jiang said.
The Taipei City government pledged earlier this month to award key informants from 10 to 50 percent of the fines collected in the latest food safety scare, which could reach up to NT$25 million, a city spokesman said earlier this month.
Apart from local government bonuses for whistleblowers, the central government will also give a reward of up to NT$2 million to anybody who exposes a food safety problem, Jiang said.
The Executive Yuan has already given a farmer who exposed the recent cooking oil scare a NT$2 million reward for his report.
As for punishing problem manufacturers, the government plans to stiffen penalties for suppliers who sell tainted products.
The maximum jail sentence will be raised from five years to seven years, but the law will still allow the sentence to be commuted to a maximum fine of NT$80 million, up from the current maximum of NT$8 million, Jiang said.
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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