Rational discussions should be held at the public hearings on a ban on food imports from five prefectures in Japan, the Association of East Asian Relations said yesterday.
The association is in charge of handling ties with Japan in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, with its counterpart, Japan’s Interchange Association.
Speaking at a news conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, association Secretary-General Peter Tsai (蔡明耀) criticized the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for mobilizing a group of people to protest at a public hearing in New Taipei City on Sunday.
“It was wrong to disrupt the event. Public hearings are places where people communicate with each other rationally,” Tsai said.
Due to the great importance Tokyo attaches to its friendship with Taipei, the Japanese government has refrained from taking the nation’s import ban to the WTO and hopes that the issue will be resolved in a rational manner, Tsai said.
Citing WTO regulations, Tsai said trade restrictions should be placed on items based on their categories rather than on the area where they are manufactured.
“It is understandable when restrictions are imposed for the sake of public safety, but five years have passed and it is time for us to rationally evaluate the safety of Japanese food,” Tsai said.
Taipei imposed an import ban on all food products from Japan’s Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Chiba prefectures in the wake of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant meltdown in March 2011.
The government’s inclination to lift the ban has faced fierce opposition from the KMT.
Most of the 11 public hearings the Executive Yuan has held thus far were disrupted by scuffles and verbal clashes. Two more hearings are scheduled for Monday next week and Jan. 8.
Calling on the government to draw from the example of the US’ and the EU’s handling of Japanese food imports, Tsai said their import regulations are synchronized with those of Japan, meaning they only import food products that are being sold locally in Japan.
Tsai also dismissed the speculation that there is a fixed timetable for the government’s relaxation of the import ban, adding that Tokyo would not export food products contaminated by radiation.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: