President Ma Ying-jeou has said that government organs at all levels need to take action to ensure the safety of food.
Ma was speaking Tuesday. It was the first public remarks Ma has made on food safety following a scandal involving reprocessed waste oil being put into food.
The president said that the Cabinet and the ruling Kuomintang caucus in the legislature must reevaluate the current system of ensuring food safety. He also said that they must implement a system of quality control in order to prevent similar safety scandals in the future.
Ma said that local governments’ lax standards of inspection were to blame for the current scandal. Citizens had been reporting the factory at the center of the scandal to the Pingtung County Government for four years. However, Ma said that it was only after the Criminal Investigation Bureau was tipped off that the scandal was uncovered.
He said that local governments must take the oil scandal as a lesson and implement thorough safety inspections in the future. At the same time, President Ma called on the health ministry to reevaluate the thoroughness of current food safety laws, as well as whether the punishments currently proscribed under the law are severe enough.