Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) yesterday said the government would “not go soft on the food safety problem” and would do everything in its power to root out food manufacturers producing adulterated foodstuffs.
“Shortages of lard will be solved by the emergency measure of relaxing rules on importing lard from countries such as Japan and Spain,” he told a press conference, reiterating the government’s determination to clamp down on the production of tainted food.
Jiang said it was confirmed in the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s latest inspection report that Ting Hsin Oil and Fat Industrial Co, a subsidiary of Ting Hsin International Group, had imported oil meant for animal feed from Vietnam and is therefore suspected of food adulteration and counterfeit.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The Vietnamese government was contacted to confirm that the Vietnamese factory had not been manufacturing cooking oil, Jiang added.
The manufacturers that have been implicated in the recent scandal are major producers and wield great influence, “but the government will not go soft on them, regardless of their scale and market share,” Jiang said.
Because the strict measures might impose certain restraints and have repercussions on the domestic food and oil markets — after many downstream products had to be pulled off shelves in the past week and more are to be cleared from the market in the next week — consumers might encounter lard shortages in the near future, but the government would come up with supporting measures, Jiang said.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, the Council of Agriculture and other related agencies convened on Friday and decided “to lift the restrictions on the importation of lard from countries such as Japan, Spain and other developed countries,” Jiang said.
“Certification and inspection work on those products will be done with care, and the tariffs will be adjusted accordingly in order to have domestic traders import the products as soon as possible and to avoid lard shortages,” he said. “The upstream materials needed for lard making will also be quickly imported as an emergency measure overseen by the council.”
As the public takes transparency seriously, Jiang said he has also required the health ministry to make public a list of companies and products suspected of using tainted oil as soon as possible.
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