A referendum proposal on US beef launched by civic groups including the Consumers’ Foundation, the Homemakers’ Union and Foundation, the John Tung Foundation and the National Health Insurance Surveillance Alliance has passed the first application threshold and is proceeding to the second stage.
The proposed referendum suggests rejecting the Department of Health’s decision to allow imports of US bone-in beef, ground beef, bovine internal organs, spinal cord, etc, starting today. It further seeks to reopen negotiations with the US over beef imports.
For the referendum application to proceed, its proponents must collect the signatures of 5 percent of the total number of people who were eligible to vote in the most recent presidential election.
Gathering the signatures of hundreds of thousands of people across the country is no simple feat. As a lawyer, I have experience handling consumer complaints, for example against the Taipei City Government’s bus office and Eastern Multimedia Group.
I helped distribute official signature forms for the present proposal for a referendum on US beef. But based on my past experience, I am concerned that the signature drive will fail.
The proposed referendum says that the protocol on US beef imports signed by Taiwan and the US in Washington on Oct. 22 allows imports of bone-in beef, ground beef, processed beef products not contaminated with specific risk materials, central nervous system parts and meat scraps stripped by machine from cows less than 30 months old.
This deal sparked fear among consumers, while pan-blue and pan-green politicians have opposed the protocol, as have several county and city governments.
The government’s decision to relax restrictions on the import of bone-in beef, internal organs and other beef products from the US despite documented cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also called mad cow disease) there — and political meddling by the government and the National Security Council in the decisions of experts at the health department are not appropriate in a democracy.
Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) say that treatment for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which is caused by abnormal prions from infected meat, cannot be cured. There is no treatment to slow or halt the course of the disease. Anyone infected with vCJD is on the road to inevitable death.
The only way to be sure of not getting the illness is to avoid eating beef products from BSE-affected countries.
To this day there have been no cases of the abnormal prion in Taiwan. Once in Taiwan, however, how would Taiwan get rid of it?
The government insists that US bone-in beef is safe, yet when the Ministry of Audit delivered a report on Oct. 27 to the legislature on the central government’s final account for last year, Auditor-General Lin Ching-long (林慶隆) said that, as of last year, the health department did not have enough personnel, funding or equipment to inspect and test US beef imports.
Furthermore, the prion can escape detection by specialized tests. This is because concentrations of the prion in certain body parts are so low that no technology exists that can guarantee that meat is free of it.
The prion’s presence can only be detected within six months of the onset of BSE. Cows less than 30 months old may be in the incubation stage of the illness, making the prion undetectable.
Health authorities have no way of guaranteeing that US beef is free of the disease, so assurances that consumers will be protected are nothing but empty talk.
Since the government is not capable of effectively testing imported beef, it should not have relaxed restrictions. Doing so puts consumers at risk.
This is a matter of consumer rights and a question of life or death for us and for future generations.
If not enough people sign the petition for this referendum proposal, Taiwan will be an object of disdain for the South Koreans. At least the South Koreans took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands to fight imports of US beef.
Yu Ying-fu is a lawyer.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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