With the government free to continue its policy of allowing imports of pork containing traces of ractopamine following referendums on Dec. 18, it has set its sights on lifting the ban on food imports from five Japanese prefectures following the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011.
The arguments for lifting the ban more than a decade after it was implemented are clear.
Concerns were initially raised over contamination of food products from the five prefectures of Chiba, Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, but there was some question over the scientific basis for those concerns due to the relatively low level of actual contamination.
Many countries retained bans on imports out of an excess of caution, but gradually lifted them, with Canada allowing the imports in 2011, New Zealand in 2012, Australia in 2014 and the Philippines in 2019. This year, Singapore lifted all measures and the EU eased its own, while the US lifted its ban in September, citing “robust control measures” in Japan.
In Asia, China, South Korea and Taiwan still have a ban in place, in all cases compounded by political considerations. The issue is not a political one for the Japanese: The bans have impeded the country’s recovery from a traumatic event. Former Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga, in power when the US lifted its ban, said he was “deeply moved” by Washington’s policy change.
Taiwanese are genuinely concerned about the food safety issue, but this concern has at times been whipped up by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) wants to lift the ban, not least because of what it would mean for Taiwan’s application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). She had wanted to lift it before the referendums, but the DPP had been concerned about a fight over food safety on two fronts, and concentrated on persuading the public to reject the KMT’s attempt to reimplement the ban on imports of pork containing traces of ractopamine, which was seen as crucial to negotiating a bilateral trade agreement with the US.
In 2018, the DPP lost a referendum on maintaining the ban on food products from the Japanese prefectures initiated by the KMT, preferring to not draw attention to the issue and not devote any resources to the campaign. That year, the DPP had also been vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, as it had opposed then-president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) proposal to lift the ban prior to Tsai coming to power in 2016.
Both parties are in their comfort zone when playing politics and appealing to their electoral bases. Hopefully, they have learned from Dec. 18’s referendums that the electorate is maturing, shunning the politicization of issues and becoming more open to persuasion by the facts and the complexity of the debate, including the repercussions that lifting the two bans would have on international trade and national security.
The government has an advantage after the pork import referendum, as Taiwanese have shown that they are on board with the government’s trade policies and the KMT is still smarting from the defeat.
However, it still has its own past objections and the 2018 referendum to factor in. If Tsai fails to persuade the public now, she is not going to get another chance.
Is this the time that Tsai could steer the political culture away from this political partisanship to a more mature, rational form of democratic debate? If she can achieve this, the post-referendum period will be far more momentous than the immediate issues of lifting impediments to free trade with the US and Japan.
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