The Council of Agriculture (COA) has developed a pork traceability system for traditional market vendors, which would enable consumers to trace the source and production of pork.
The QR code-based system was developed to give consumers access to information such as pig farms, date and location of pig auctions and butchery, Animal Husbandry Division official Chen Chung-hsing (陳中興) said.
Taiwan is a major pork-consuming country, with pork accounting for about 46 percent of total meat consumption in the nation and Taiwanese consuming about 34kg of pork per person per year, the council said.
Refrigerated pork sold at supermarkets is traceable, but a majority of pork is sold in traditional markets, where consumers have no access to information on where the pork is sourced and produced.
“Unpackaged and unrefrigerated pork sold in traditional markets accounts for more than 70 percent of the nation’s total pork sales, and the tracking system was designed to ensure that pork can be traceable throughout the entire supply chain,” Chen said.
The council is working with the Ministry of Health and Welfare to enable authorities to identify the source of problematic pork with the traceability system, he said, adding that the most common food safety issue involving pork is not sanitation, but excessive drug residue.
The system is expected to allow authorities to hold farms accountable for high levels of drugs found in pork.
The system is to be launched in September, and vendors will be given a pre-generated QR code to log traceability information, while consumers will be able to access the information via smartphone applications.
The council expects the system to cover 50 percent of pork vendors nationwide by March next year.
In response to speculation that the system was developed to allow consumers to differentiate between locally produced and imported pork amid controversy over imports of US pork containing ractopamine, the council said the system has nothing to do with US pork products.
“Hardly any pork sold in traditional markets is imported. Pork sold in traditional markets is not refrigerated or packaged, but imported pork products are always refrigerated. It is unlikely that [traditional market] vendors would sell unfrozen pork. Allegations that the system was developed to pave the way for US pork imports are misleading,” Chen said, adding that the traceability system was devised to improve pork distribution and sales channels.
Imported pork is more likely to end up in restaurants and food processing factories, and the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) requires restaurants to reveal the country of origin of meat products, he added.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching