Representatives of the petrochemical industry yesterday urged the government to facilitate negotiations and the inking of a trade in goods agreement with China, the biggest market for Taiwanese plastics and chemical products.
Establishing such a cross-strait trade agreement is even more vital for the industry than joining the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact, Petrochemical Industry Association of Taiwan chairman Chen Bao-lang (陳寶郎) said at a seminar on the impact and challenges posed by the TPP to Taiwan.
China’s imposition of a 6.5 percent tariff on petrochemical imports from Taiwan makes Taiwanese producers less competitive compared with their foreign rivals, which are granted zero tariffs on their exports to China through their investments in ASEAN countries, due to the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area.
While the petrochemical industry supports the government’s efforts to join the TPP, many in the industry believe that the signing of a cross-strait trade-in-goods pact is more important, Chen said.
Taiwan’s biggest problem in its bid to join the TPP is not its eligibility, but negotiations over terms to be admitted to the trade bloc, he said.
Access to the TPP could be more complex than for WTO accession, because the TPP calls for full trade liberalization, in contrast with the partial reforms accepted in WTO protocols, he said.
The TPP also encompasses more stringent reciprocal obligations for those countries prepared to undertake them, he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,