The Council of Agriculture (COA) yesterday said it would proposed an amendment to the Certified Agricultural Standard’s (CAS) regulations within a month following a spate of food scandals that has undermined the credibility of the food-quality label.
The council was asked to report before the legislature’s Economic Committee what measures it plans to take to improve the local food accreditation system after many products with the CAS label, or the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certification, were found to be unsafe.
According to the Agricultural Production and Certification Act (農產品生產及驗證管理法), the CAS label — estabablished by the council and administered by the CAS association — is given to manufacturers of agricultural food and processed agricultural food products if their products passed the standards set for its hygiene management, product health and safety, and packaging.
Council statistics show that as of last month, a total of 6,547 meat products, frozen food products, dairy and other agricultural products from 333 manufacturers carried the CAS label.
The association can withdraw a manufacturer’s CAS label if it fails to pass random inspections more than three times a year. It has removed the CAS label from 47 manufacturers over the past three years — including 564 products from 22 manufacturers this year.
“The CAS label serves as an ‘amulet’ to protect homemakers when they are shopping for daily groceries, but now the ‘amulet’ is damaged, and yet a manufacturer has to fail three random checks before it loses its qualification,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) said. “So now, the CAS label is more like an ‘amulet’ for dishonest manufacturers.”
“If certification labels given by the government cannot assure the public that they are safe, and has even become the ‘amulet’ of manufacturers, I think the accreditation system has become meaningless,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Ming-wen (陳明文) said.
Wang said that the council would amend the Agricultural Production and Certification Act to stipulate that if a food product fails to meet the requirements set by the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法), the local government can immediately impose a fine and withdraw its CAS qualification, meaning it does not have to wait for the maker to fail three inspections.
Wang added that while he could not predict how long it would take for the amendment to be enacted, he promised to present the draft amendment within a month.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS