The government has no timetable for allowing imports of US pork containing ractopamine or Japanese food products from five prefectures near the site of a nuclear meltdown, Premier William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday.
“Safety is the highest principle and standard for the government when considering whether to approve the entry of foreign food products,” Lai said in response to questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.
“The government will not permit the entry of harmful food products from other nations at the cost of the Taiwanese public’s health,” he added.
Lai was referring to the ban on imports of US pork containing the leanness-enhancing feed additive ractopamine that has been in place since 2006 and food products from Japan’s Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Chiba prefectures, which remain banned by the government following the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster caused by a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan on March 11, 2011.
The issue of food safety returned to the public eye again after Washington reiterated in the Office of the US Trade Representative’s 2018 Trade Policy Agenda and 2017 Annual Report that the ban on US pork remains an obstacle to the signing of a free-trade agreement with Taipei.
Taipei has also been under pressure from Tokyo, which has demanded that Taiwan open its market to food imports from the five prefectures.
In late January, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said the government might review its ban on food imports from the five prefectures, in line with global practices.
“It is time to reassess Taiwan’s policy on Japanese food imports, and the government might follow the US and adopt risk-based restrictions instead of the current ban, which is based on region,” Chen said.
Several days prior to Chen’s remarks, Representative to Japan Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said he fears that Taiwan’s ban on Japanese food imports could affect Taiwan’s efforts to take part in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership led by Japan.
KMT Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) early last month said he plans to revive a referendum drive he initiated in 2016 to continue the nation’s ban on Japanese food products that might have been contaminated by radiation.
The referendum drive, initiated in December 2016 by a civil alliance on food safety established by Hau, had collected 110,000 signatures, far greater than the revised threshold of 1,800 to initiate national and regional referendums, Hau’s office said, adding that it was shelved after then-premier Lin Chuan (林全) early last year pledged that the ban would not be relaxed.
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