A consumer rights organization and a tea farmer yesterday urged the establishment of a traceability system using isotope analysis to authenticate the origin of agricultural products to prevent false labeling or adulterated products and protect the nation’s agriculture.
At a news conference at the Legislative Yuan yesterday, Green Consumers’ Foundation chairman Jay Fang (方儉) said that mislabeling and adulteration have damaged the reputation of Taiwan’s agriculture and compromised food safety, and that an advanced traceability system is necessary to protect Taiwanese products.
The foundation launched a one-year program with a tea farm in Hsinchu County’s Beipu Township (北埔), which is known as the home of oriental beauty tea, to collect the farm’s unique “fingerprints,” or isotope signatures — isotope ratios that are unique to a particular area, Fang said.
Isotope fingerprints can be used to determine whether a batch of tea is from a specific region or even a specific farm, but the fingerprinting method has never been attempted before in Taiwan’s or China’s tea industries, he said.
Farm owner and Beipu Culture Workshop director Ku Wu-nan (古武南), whose family has produced oriental beauty tea for generations, described himself as a “victim of adulteration of tea,” a rampant practice in the tea industry that cannot be easily corrected.
“The township produces only about 500 jin [300kg] of oriental beauty tea every year, but more than 10,000 jin of oriental beauty tea enters the county’s oriental beauty tea competition every year. It is very likely that competition teas are not grown in the county, but adulterated with products from other places, even Vietnam,” Ku said, adding that his tea farm, about 1.45 hectares, produces just 15 jin of oriental beauty tea a year.
“Prize-winning teas can be sold for tens of thousands of New Taiwan dollars per jin, but consumers might spend that money on adulterated teas,” he said.
To preserve local culture and the tea industry, it is imperative to have the means to verify the origin of teas, which cannot be achieved with regular testing methods, he said.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Karen Yu (余宛如) said that developing origin verification systems is a global trend, especially for high-value agriculture products, such as coffee, cheese and wines, but Taiwan has allowed the value of local produce to fall because adulterated products are widely circulated and damage Taiwan’s reputation.
The agricultural industry is in desperate need of an origin verification system to distinguish locally produced products from others to maintain competitiveness and ensure food safety, Yu said.
Johanne Liou (劉喬安), a Taiwanese woman who shot to unwanted fame during the Sunflower movement protests in 2014, was arrested in Boston last month amid US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said yesterday. The arrest of Liou was first made public on the official Web site of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday. ICE said Liou was apprehended for overstaying her visa. The Boston Field Office’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) had arrested Liou, a “fugitive, criminal alien wanted for embezzlement, fraud and drug crimes in Taiwan,” ICE said. Liou was taken into custody
The US-Japan joint statement released on Friday not mentioning the “one China” policy might be a sign that US President Donald Trump intends to decouple US-China relations from Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said. Following Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Friday, the US and Japan issued a joint statement where they reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and support for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations. Trump has not personally brought up the “one China” policy in more than a year, National Taiwan University Department of Political Science Associate Professor Chen Shih-min (陳世民)
‘NEVER!’ Taiwan FactCheck Center said it had only received donations from the Open Society Foundations, which supports nonprofits that promote democratic values Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) has never received any donation from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a cofounder of the organization wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday. The Taipei-based organization was established in 2018 by Taiwan Media Watch Foundation and the Association of Quality Journalism to monitor and verify news and information accuracy. It was officially registered as a foundation in 2021. National Chung Cheng University communications professor Lo Shih-hung (羅世宏), a cofounder and chairman of TFC, was responding to online rumors that the TFC receives funding from the US government’s humanitarian assistance agency via the Open Society Foundations (OSF),
ANNUAL LIGHT SHOW: The lanterns are exhibited near Taoyuan’s high-speed rail station and around the Taoyuan Sports Park Station of the airport MRT line More than 400 lanterns are to be on display at the annual Taiwan Lantern Festival, which officially starts in Taoyuan today. The city is hosting the festival for the second time — the first time was in 2016. The Tourism Administration held a rehearsal of the festival last night. Chunghwa Telecom donated the main lantern of the festival to the Taoyuan City Government. The lanterns are exhibited in two main areas: near the high-speed rail (HSR) station in Taoyuan, which is at the A18 station of the Taoyuan Airport MRT, and around the Taoyuan Sports Park Station of the MRT
RSS