Japan's agriculture minister yesterday called a US probe into the outbreak of mad cow disease incomplete and said his country would not reconsider a six-week ban on American beef until it receives new proposals from Wash-ington for tighter safeguards.
Japan is pressing the US to test all cattle for the disease before slaughter, a measure implemented by Japan's much smaller beef industry after a mad cow scare here two years ago.
The US says blanket testing is unnecessary and would be pro-hibitively expensive, but a series of US agriculture and trade officials sent to Tokyo to persuade Japan to lift an import ban have come away empty handed.
Agriculture Minister Yoshiyuki Kamei said yesterday that he had asked the most recent delegation to propose safeguards "based on" Japan's system, which Kamei credited with restoring consumer confidence in Japanese beef.
"We have explained our country's position," Kamei said in a television interview. "We are expecting some kind of proposal from the United States."
Before it suspended imports on Dec. 24, Japan was the most lucrative export market for US beef, buying almost US$1 billion worth in 2002.
Kamei criticized last month's decision by the US Agricultural Department to give up efforts to track all 80 cows that entered the US from a Canadian farm with a single Holstein that tested positive for the disease in Washington state in December. The probe closed after 28 cows were traced.
"It's unclear where the other 50 cows ended up, and that's not adequate," he said. "I don't think they made enough of an effort."
"There's no guarantee there won't be a second or third case, and Japanese consumers need to feel confident about eating American beef even if that happens," he said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has