The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday said it had completed the 2016 to 2020 White Paper on Food Safety that aims to apply cross-ministerial resources to probe food safety violations.
Since July last year the administration held meetings with specialists from various ministries and academics, referenced food safety management mechanisms and researched trends in other nations to formulate a comprehensive paper on food safety, FDA Deputy Director-General Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美) said.
FDA Division of Food Safety official Cheng Wei-chih (鄭維智) said food scandals were mainly exposed through inspections conducted by local health departments, but the process takes a lot of time and resources, and can be like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”
With the establishment of the “Food Cloud” — a food traceability cloud application — and integrated food management information between central and local governments, the administration has a system of alerts prompting it to inspect companies suspected of violating food safety regulations, he said, adding that active inspections are to be conducted when data abnormalities are found.
Chiang said the administration had to work alone before the databases were integrated, but now the comprehensive database means ministry cooperation can be closer and inspections more effective.
Using the system, the administration investigated a company cited in the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) waste food oil report system and the FDA’s food industry registration system for large amounts of waste oil treatment.
The administration investigated whether the waste oil had been recycled and returned to the nation’s food supply, she said.
Chiang said the administration can compare information on oil for animal feed from the Council of Agriculture with the administration’s system to know which companies possess both animal grade and food grade oil and investigate whether animal feed oil has been mixed with food oil.
“We absolutely will not loosen our inspection mechanism, but rather refine our management system with the cooperation between ministries,” Chiang said.
“Our goal is to create a safe food chain, ‘from farm to table,’ and build trust among consumers,” she said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift