The tainted oil scandal and the government’s handling of the issue is similar to all past food safety scandals, exposing slack regulations and laws from the central government down to local governments, a lack of horizontal linkages and potential official corruption. What is even more shocking is how both the ruling and opposition parties have praised the work of party members who are serving in office, despite their having slacked off for a long time now.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) blamed the food safety scandals on overzealous reporting by the media. However, apart from proving that he knows nothing about democracy and the media — unless he was deliberately trying to confuse the public by obscuring the facts — Chiu’s comments only highlight an ignorance of the system countries like the US have in place for food safety management.
A few days ago, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, citing Article 15 of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法), ordered that food products made using tainted oil, lard products allegedly refined with feed-oil imported from Hong Kong and other substandard oils be removed from shelves, adding that it was going to fine more than a dozen manufacturers a total of more than NT$80 million (US$2.6 million). It also said that based on Article 7, manufacturers must remove all products at their own expense, and as stated in Article 28, may be punished for false advertising.
The question is whether the aforementioned punishments are legitimate and will stand up in court. The ministry will most probably cite Article 15, Clause 7 of the food safety act, which states that: “Foods that have been adulterated or counterfeited shall not be manufactured, processed, prepared, packaged, transported, stored, sold, imported, exported, presented as a gift or publicly displayed” to sanction those found guilty of having produced or used tainted oil in their products.
However, is this enough to cover the different types of problems caused by tainted oil?
In a legal sense, “foods that have been adulterated or counterfeited” should pertain to clearly defined content; can this be used then as a legal basis to sanction manufacturers of oils or food products that have not “been adulterated or counterfeited?” Demanding that manufacturers reclaim all products at their own expense without any external help and without any legal basis can easily give rise to debates regarding “excessive reclaims,” not to mention that Article 28, which pertains to false advertising, can easily be misinterpreted and lead to debates over its interpretation.
While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has established regulations, such as hygienic standards for edible oils, they are not the same as the standards of identity for food in the West, which mandate that each type of food or oil product sold on the market under a specific name should meet certain standards. Taiwan’s legal system lacks the management laws the US Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture have had in place for many years now, and so when faced with problems caused by the modern and complex food production systems, it is hard to give clear specifications for each different type of food product and ascertain whether a contested product should be classified as one that has been adulterated or counterfeited.
As such, although legal measures on tainted oil were passed because of strong public pressure, there remain serious gaps in the nation’s legal system governing food safety. Controls on food safety in Taiwan will continue to be marked by irregularities found in less advanced countries.
In addition, the food traceability system set up by Taiwan’s FDA can only operate under the existing legal system — meaning it can only perform the limited function of assisting in chasing up on products once they have been found to be tainted, but it cannot help prevent food safety problems before they happen or help with smart food production that can be of huge benefit to food safety.
The gaps in current laws on food safety are also reflected in the debate over the tainted oil scandal, with some questioning whether scientific evidence alone is enough to prove that tainted oil is bad for humans. When it comes to problematic food products that are supposedly “not harmful to health” as many have claimed, Taiwan once again lacks a legal basis, as opposed to Western countries and even several Asian countries, which have clear legislation on food products unfit for human consumption.
With these laws, regardless of whether there is any clear scientific evidence to prove that certain food products and types of oil are harmful to humans, as long as the competent authorities ascertain that potential risks exist during the production of a particular food product, or even on a social or mass psychological level, they can say that the product in question is unfit for human consumption and can use food safety controls to demand a manufacturer remove that product from stores.
If the Legislative Yuan and the Executive Yuan had followed standards like this from the beginning, there would not be this ridiculous debate about tainted oil only “hurting a person’s feelings and not their health.”
The Executive Yuan’s eight new measures that are part of a multi-pronged plan for food safety are a mere rehash of old measures. They neither address any of the above-mentioned problems nor represent any real reform.
The public needs to think long and hard whether it is fitting for a modern country supposedly governed by the rule of law to have a government that has failed to fill in the gaps in the legal system and is merely content to impose tougher laws and stricter sentences or increase rewards for those who report violators after food safety disasters have already happened and the public has already ingested problematic food products. Is this what we really want for Taiwan?
Liu Ching-yi is a professor in the College of Social Sciences at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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