More than 70 percent of the public are opposed to easing a ban on imports of beef containing ractopamine, People First Party legislative caucus whip Thomas Lee (李桐豪) said yesterday, citing an opinion poll, and he accused the government of lying in its arguments for easing the ban.
As the majority of the public are against easing the ban, “the Legislative Yuan, as a representative of public opinion, should respect that opinion,” Lee said.
Citing an opinion poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday, with more than 1,000 valid samples collected from citizens over 20 years of age, Lee said that as many as 72.5 percent of respondents are against lifting the ban.
“The UN’s Codex Alimentarius Commission is meeting next month and is probably not going to set a residual allowance level for ractopamine, which means ractopamine would not be allowed at all in food,” Lee said. “We should follow the Codex’s standards.”
He criticized the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) proposals to amend the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法) to set a maximum allowable level for racotopamine residues in food, supporting the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) “zero tolerance” revision proposals.
“Ractopamine should not be present at all, that’s the real Codex standard,” he said.
He also panned the government for saying that the EU had lost a lawsuit for banning ractopamine.
“The dispute between the EU and the US was about the use of estradinol, progesterone, testosterone, melengesterol acetate and zeranol. It did not include ractopamine at all,” Lee said. “The government should not intentionally spread such false information.”
He was referring to remarks by KMT spokesman Yin Wei (殷瑋) earlier this month on a lawsuit between the EU and the US on additives in food.
Commenting on President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) remarks that lifting the ban is an important step toward talks on trade agreements, including the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, free-trade agreements and the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, Lee said that Taiwan had fallen behind and it was too late now to talk about such trade liberalization.
“The best way for the development of Taiwan is to adjust industrial structures,” he said.
Lee called on the government and the KMT not to try to force through amendments in the legislature, as “this is only going to create more disputes between different political camps.”
Meanwhile, a separate poll yesterday found that most people were willing to put the US beef controversy to a referendum, despite differing opinions on whether to adopt a pending international standard on ractopamine residues.
The survey, conducted on Monday and Tuesday by Taiwan Indication Survey Research (TISR), showed 60.9 percent of respondents, including more than half of pan-blue supporters, agreed to put the ractopamine residues issue to a referendum.
TISR general manager Tai Li-an (戴立安) said the poll showed that the public remained divided on the amount of allowable ractopamine residues, with 46.2 percent saying they agree with setting maximum residue levels in accordance with the final decision of the UN Codex Alimentarius Commission next month, while 40 percent disagreed.
The poll also showed President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) approval rating dipping to 22.4 percent, and only 29.2 percent of respondents deemed Ma as “credible.”
More than half — 53.4 percent — of those polled said they did not trust Ma as a leader, according to the survey.
The DPP was recognized by 37.9 percent of respondents, including 20 percent of pan-blue supporters, as the political party with the best performance in safeguarding public interests amid the US beef controversy.
The KMT finished a distant second at 14.8 percent, the poll showed.
The poll collected 1,009 samples and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS