Chinese-language media reports that school lunch programs used mercury-tainted rice from Hsinchu are untruthful, the Agriculture and Food Agency said yesterday.
Want Weekly reported that the government had bought rice harvested from paddies watered from a compromised irrigation channel to use in school lunches, the agency said.
An independent lab discovered mercury residue in the soil and that the rice had been distributed, “harming the next generation” of Taiwanese, the agency cited the report as saying.
Photo: Taipei Times
However, all of the crops in locations affected by mercury pollution were destroyed before reaching children and other consumers, the agency said.
The Ministry of Environment has been monitoring mercury residue levels in the region and discovered several contaminated locations, prompting action by agriculture and food officials, it said.
The allegations in the media are “not possible” due to the layers of safeguards that the agency has to keep tainted rice out of the supply chains for school lunch programs, Agriculture and Food Agency Deputy Director Huang Chao-hsing (黃昭興) said.
Huang did not name the media firms that published the reports.
Rice and grain procured for government use are always tested before being processed for consumption or storage, he said.
School lunch programs only use rice produced by collectives that comply with place-of-origin labeling rules and they undergo regular tests for pollutants on-site, he said.
The agency’s standard operating procedure is to monitor the soil of crop-growing regions deemed to be at risk of pollution by heavy metals, Huang said.
The monitoring system applies to confirmed or suspected heavy metal pollution, and cases in which soil tests revealed pollution levels bordering on the legal limit, he said.
The monitoring system applies to areas where pollution was previously confirmed, areas where there are unconfirmed reports of pollution and areas where tests revealed high, but legal levels of pollution, he said.
If tests show a level of heavy metal residue that exceeds the legal limit, the local government would dispose of crops growing in the affected region under the agency’s supervision, he said.
Media reports of mercury pollution appear to have conflated the safety standards for soil and crops, Huang added.
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