The Control Yuan on Wednesday censured the Council of Agriculture (COA) over a spike in garlic prices from July to September last year.
Control Yuan member Chen Chin-jun (陳景峻) conducted a probe that led to the sanction, it said in a news release.
The wholesale price of garlic was NT$170 per kilogram early last year, but skyrocketed to as much as NT$400 per kilogram, the Control Yuan cited Chen’s report as saying.
The price rise occurred after unusually large shipments of imported garlic were rejected over soil contamination, but the council’s failure on multiple occasions to react to warnings compounded the supply shortages, the report said.
Farmers’ cooperatives in March last year discovered instances of soil contamination, despite customs inspections, it said.
The cooperatives reported the issue to the Bureau of Plant and Animal Inspection, which rejected the shipments after conducting additional tests, it said.
The inconsistencies in the bureau’s first and second batches of tests — some of which were performed by the same inspectors — implied a lack of rigor, the report said.
The bureau failed to share this information with the Agriculture and Food Agency, it said, adding that it was a poor show of inter-departmental coordination within the council.
Prices of garlic rose steadily in the following months, surging about NT$75, or close to 50 percent, in one week in late July last year, it said.
The council received ample warnings in the form of reports from farmers’ groups, a consumer complaint relayed by the New Taipei City Government and media reports, it said.
However, the council’s inactivity continued until Aug. 6 last year, when the Executive Yuan’s price stabilization task force stepped in, it said.
The task force wasted more time mulling the issue until finally taking action on Aug. 19 last year, the Control Yuan said.
Council officials had prepared interventions for when garlic prices became too low, but there was no preparation for the opposite scenario, it said.
This shows that the council did not carry out its duty to protect consumers as a member of the price stabilization task force, it said, adding that the belated policy response has cast doubt on the usefulness of the task force itself.
The Yunlin County Government was also negligent in its duty to supervise retailers and to cooperate with the Ministry of Justice in an investigation, the report said, citing the Agricultural Products Market Transaction Act (農產品市場交易法).
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching