Far East digest

Taiwan government watchdog has reprimanded the Ministry of Health and Welfare and other agencies for oversights that it said led to a food scare involving a company that sold lard made from recycled oil. 

Its investigation comes in the wake of last year’s scandal which saw thousands of consumers demand refunds from bakeries across Taiwan after food inspection authorities discovered that hundreds of tonnes of lard had been manufactured from so-called gutter oil—cooking oil that had been recycled from kitchen waste and grease from leather processing plants.

The Control Yuan blamed the ministry​ for not conducting proper inspections and for not requiring local authorities to conduct their own quality checks on edible oils, which would likely have slowed the scandal’s progress.

It also reprimanded the Environmental Protection Administration for failing to keep track of recycled oils. The Control Yuan had previously ordered the public body to do so five years ago, it said.

Finally, the Pingtung County government was also held to account for ignoring multiple complaints filed by a farmer against an underground factory which supplied questionable oil to Chang Guann Co., a Kaohsiung-based maker of lard-based oil, margarine and shortening that was at the centre of the scandal. 

Japan and Taiwan come to table to diffuse Fukushima produce import row​

A working group will meet this month to discuss moves by Taiwan to tighten restrictions on the import of Japanese food into the country.

Chou Shyue-yow, a senior official in Taiwan’s foreign ministry, said the meeting was intended to resolving issues between the countries after Japanese food imports from five nuclear-affected Japanese prefectures were discovered on the island earlier this year. 

The Taipei meeting will set out to clarify why the products were mislabeled and imported into Taiwan, Chou said. 

"The meeting will attempt to find a solution to make sure such incidents will not happen again​," he noted. 

A previous meeting was held in Tokyo late last month on the same issue, during which a consensus was reached to look into the cause of the food import row. 

Taiwan banned the import of food produced in the five nuclear-affected prefectures of Japan following the nuclear disaster of March 2011. 

Local governments decided to tighten restrictions when products from those prefectures were discovered on shelves in Taiwan earlier this year. 

North Korean measures to avoid food crisis are behind growing food stocks​

North Korea has made moves to stave off drought by updating its farming methods and changing to crops with better yields, Reuters has reported, after a UN official warned of another “huge food deficit​.” 

The country is no stranger to famine, and its officials have in recent years been watching international food aid fall sharply because of its reluctance to allow monitoring of food distribution. 

North Korean food supplies are on the rise with production at its highest levels since the mid-2000s, having recovered from last year’s drought, which was the worst in 30 years.

Changes gradually being made to North Korea’s highly centralised system might be behind this growth in food supplies. 

For example, the country now allows smaller groups of farmers to keep a greater share of their crops, which they are allowed to sell in markets, which in turn improved distribution.

“Supply this year will be even more stable and any shortfall is likely to be met sufficiently by imports​,” Kwon Tae-jin, an expert on North Korean agriculture, told Reuters.

“Improvement in the supply of food isn’t likely by chance or a temporary situation,” he said, crediting an increased allocation of resources in agriculture​. 

There have also been reports of a reasonably successful new farm management system. “The production was okay last year, despite the drought, and there are more coping mechanisms in place this year​,” she said.