Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators and dairy farmers yesterday called on the Council of Agriculture to help dairy farmers, as most of them who sell their products through Wei Chuan Foods Corp (味全食品工業) have been affected by the recent boycott of the brand by consumers.
The boycott was prompted by two subdiaries of the Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團) that were found to have been selling tainted cooking oil. Consumers call for boycotting all Ting Hsin products, including milk from Wei Chuan, which is also a member of the group, though the milk itself is safe.
“As consumers are boycotting milk marketed by Wei Chuan under the brand Linfengying (林鳳營), dairy farmers who sell raw milk to Wei Chuan are worried that their business may be affected,” DPP Legislator Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) told a news conference at the Legislative Yuan. “It’s not fair; when people see ‘Linfengying,’ they immediately think of the unethical business, but there’s no problem with the milk, and the dairy farmers are innocent.”
“Of course we support the people’s boycott of an unethical business, but it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that collateral damage is minimized, and help diary farmers to sell their products to other food companies,” DPP Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) added.
Dairy farmer Huang Te-jen (黃德仁) said many senior dairy farmers are very worried, some to the extent that they cannot sleep at night, “because we’ve all been in the business for decades; this is the only way we can make a living.”
In response, Wang Chung-shu (王忠恕), chief of the council’s livestock industry division, said the council had negotiated with Wei Chuan on Tuesday, and the company has consented to release one-third of the raw milk they purchase each day to other companies in the diary business for at least one month.
DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) asked the council to ask Wei Chuan to allow other companies to take over all of its raw milk production, instead of just one-third of it.
Wang said that is not possible because Wei Chuan has signed five-year supply contracts with most of the dairy farmers, so the council is unable to force them to allow farmers to sell all the production to other companies.
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