What can Taiwan, China learn from Europe's cost-cutting, cheap consumption and government cover-ups?

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Europe's tainted egg scandal is growing bigger and bigger. From the alarm raised at the end of July, it has now affected eight countries. After Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, "bad eggs" contaminated with the pesticide fipronil have also flowed into the UK, France, Switzerland, Sweden and Luxembourg. As countries rush to pull them from shelves and trace those responsible, the Netherlands and Belgium are exposing each other's wounds, accusing one another of delaying notification, which caused the tainted egg uproar to spiral out of control.

The Netherlands produces 10 billion eggs a year, and the crisis spreads like dominoes

On July 20, Belgium sounded the alarm in the EU's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF), pointing out that fipronil residues in Dutch eggs reached as high as 1.2 mg/kg. After an investigation, the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) said on July 31: "The fipronil residues in some eggs are too high and can harm human health." It asked the public not to eat them, demanded that stores and supermarkets remove them from shelves, destroyed millions of tainted eggs, and sealed off 180 poultry farms.

The Netherlands covers 40,000 sq km and has a population of 16 million, but it raises 50 million laying hens and produces 10 billion eggs a year, making it the world's second-largest exporter after the United States. When something goes wrong in the Netherlands, neighbouring countries are hit one after another like falling dominoes.

Germany accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the Netherlands' egg export market. "It is very likely that tens of millions of tainted eggs have flowed in," said the agriculture authority of Lower Saxony, which borders the Netherlands. The discount supermarket Aldi resorted to extreme measures, requiring all 4,000 of its stores in Germany to remove eggs from their shelves entirely.

Tainted eggs have also appeared in Switzerland, which is not an EU member. Besides Aldi, the similarly low-price Migros supermarket chain was also affected.

Legal pesticide Dega16 was mixed with fipronil, and poultry farmers say they did not know

As for the culprits behind the "bad eggs", attention currently points to two companies: ChickFriend in the Netherlands and Poultry Vision in Belgium. ChickFriend, which handles pest control, purchased a red mite treatment from Poultry Vision. Perhaps to strengthen its effectiveness, this Belgian manufacturer bought fipronil from Romania, an Eastern European country with looser controls, and mixed it into the legal pesticide Dega16.

After the tainted egg incident broke out, ChickFriend did not come forward in the face of overwhelming questions, and even its website was blank. To this day, it remains unclear whether this Dutch company knew early on that Dega16 contained fipronil, or whether it was deceived by Poultry Vision.

Dutch poultry farmers, however, all cried foul. "The sad thing is that poultry farmers entrusted ChickFriend to disinfect and clean the henhouses, but they had no idea this company used illegal ingredients. I would not be surprised if 20 to 25 percent of poultry farmers were affected. Many may not survive this crisis," said Aalt den Herder, a member of the poultry farmers' union, helplessly.

Belgium, which initially pointed the finger at Dutch egg farms, also had fipronil flow into its poultry farms. It has sealed off 51 farms and is monitoring 86.

Italy, whose egg self-sufficiency rate reaches 95 percent, has so far escaped disaster for the time being, but its health ministry has also ordered the health bureaus of its directly administered regions and the health police (NAS) to closely trace the use and flow of Dega16 in the country.

Belgium and the Netherlands expose each other's wounds, and tainted eggs may have circulated secretly for a year

Through the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed and tracing egg codes back to their source, countries took immediate action to control the food safety crisis. But the tainted eggs may have been circulating secretly for a year already.

Dutch media pointed out that since June of last year, some poultry farms had begun hiring ChickFriend to fight the troublesome red mite. Belgian Agriculture Minister Denis Ducarme said at a parliamentary hearing: "An internal Dutch document as early as last November pointed out that Dutch eggs contained fipronil." He also accused the Netherlands of repeatedly failing to explain, saying, "When a major egg exporting country does not provide this information, it is a big problem."

The Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority responded: "Saying that we knew eggs contained fipronil last November is untrue." But it also admitted that it had received a tip-off, "but at the time it did not indicate a threat to food safety." Hearing the government's contradictory defence, the Dutch Party for the Animals demanded that lawmakers cut short their holidays and return to their posts to investigate the case.

It was like children shifting blame after causing trouble, each laughing at the other's faults while being just as guilty. Because a poultry farm's own test found fipronil residues, Belgium learned of the secret spread of tainted eggs as early as May, but citing the confidentiality of the investigation, it did not notify neighbouring countries through the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed until the end of July. Germany, the hardest-hit country, complained: "But at first they did not say that Dega16 had been contaminated." The European Commission launched an investigation because Belgium violated rules requiring immediate notification on matters concerning food safety.

Who hatched the tainted eggs?

Belgium, whose area is comparable to Taiwan, China, has Dutch-speaking and French-speaking communities that have long disliked each other and even undermined each other, seriously affecting administrative efficiency and credibility. After the Paris terror attacks, it was repeatedly accused by European allies of failing to detect the terrorists' movements early enough. Belgium also has a prior record of failing to report food safety issues properly.

Belgium discovered dioxin-tainted eggs in January 1999, but worried about the impact on agricultural exports, so it did not reveal until the end of May that the feed had been contaminated. Because it could not provide information on where the dioxin-contaminated feed had gone, the European Commission simply banned the sale of the country's eggs, beef, pork, cheese and milk entirely. Belgium tried to steal a chicken but lost the rice it used as bait.

Yet at the root of it all, what hatched the tainted eggs was a production model focused solely on driving down costs. In different countries, the places where the most "bad eggs" appeared were the cheap supermarkets that bought at low prices. You save a few yuan at checkout, but the price paid is people's health, the animal welfare of hens that can barely stand up, and an environment covered in manure.