Lean-meat American pork: a matter of schoolchildren's health or of lobbying public opinion?

Text | Huang Jialin

New Council of Agriculture Minister Tsao Chi-hung's remark that "who has the ability to keep American pork imports closed" was met with an open retort from his just-departed predecessor Chen Bao-ji, who asked how anyone could say they cannot hold the line before negotiations have even begun. The two ministers, past and present, have bloodily poked a hornet's nest in the media over US-Taiwan trade and the political realities of a change of government, laying bare completely the hairpin turns in the past and present positions of the ruling and opposition camps, blue and green, on ractopamine in American beef and pork, and the issue has even spread to the lunches of Taiwan's schoolchildren.

Minister Tsao's words were of course not an impromptu performance. The new government may draw its battle line with the claim that this is a "fake issue," arguing that imports of American pork would have little real impact on Taiwan's meat market but are the entry ticket to TPP negotiations, leaving the Tsai administration with no choice; or it may put forward arguments such as strengthening the health of domestic pig farmers first, and using independent risk assessments and relevant scientific evidence as the basis for guarding the nation's food safety.

Hearing the reasons and proposed responses behind the old and new governments' hairpin turns, apart from the sense of being lost in time and space, they are truly so vague as to be beyond belief.

First, former Minister Chen's long-distance slap in the face leaves one dumbfounded. In 2012, who was it that used its numerical advantage in the Legislative Yuan to pass the amendment to the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation allowing American beef containing ractopamine into the Taiwan market? The Kuomintang caucus! In the same year, which competent authorities announced the opening and set the permitted level for ractopamine addition to domestic cattle feed in Taiwan? The Ma administration's Ministry of Health and Welfare and Council of Agriculture! Who was the Council of Agriculture minister at the time who sat by while the policy of separating beef and pork failed, while domestic CAS pork processed products were repeatedly found to contain ractopamine residue, while illegal leanness-enhancing drugs ran rampant, and while it was even possible for them to enter lunches that included pork almost every day, so that teachers and students ate them without knowing? Chen Bao-ji!

But the so-called "fake issue" claim of the DPP think tank cannot stand.

On average, 8,000 to 9,000 metric tons of pork without ractopamine are imported from the United States each year, already making it the third-largest source after Canada and Denmark. The price gap between American imported pork and Taiwan carcasses is 10 yuan per kilogram, and the current main market is the low-price consumer end, including processed foods, institutional meals, and snack bars and buffets. After the import of ractopamine-containing American pork is opened, prices will be pushed even lower, and the livelihoods of Taiwan's pig farmers and the food-consumption risks faced by consumers will face even more severe tests. For Taiwanese people, who consume an average of 34 kg of pork per year and whose current self-sufficiency rate for domestically produced pork is above 90%, this is absolutely not a so-called fake issue; whether in terms of public perception, food risk awareness, or political wrestling, ractopamine is a genuine consideration that genuinely shapes ordinary life and the public sphere.

Under the shadow of lean-meat American pork, politicians of every color, blue, green, orange, yellow, and black, have all come to discuss schoolchildren's lunches: if cheap lean-meat American pork succeeds in forcing its way in, can children's lunches, which cost only 20 or 30 yuan per meal, possibly escape ractopamine, which remains highly controversial for human consumption risk? Can the 2.5 million servings of campus meals supplied to teachers and students every day possibly escape the extremely high-risk leanness-enhancing drug? And is it still possible to amend the School Health Act to list ractopamine pork as an item prohibited from entering campuses?

The incoming new government has rolled out phrases such as "risk assessment based on scientific evidence" and "strict meat labeling." For campus lunches exposed to the risk of ractopamine, what counts as scientific evidence and assessment with reference value? Is there really a way to prevent teachers and students on campus from eating ractopamine?

Let us look at what scientific evidence currently exists. According to the written materials from the special reports by the National Health Research Institutes and the Ministry of Education at the Legislative Yuan on May 2, what the National Health Research Institutes provided was a report on Taiwanese people's consumption of ractopamine beef, and it explained that beef intake among Taiwanese people is positively correlated with age; the Ministry of Education, meanwhile, trotted out ingredient regulation management to explain that current measures are comprehensive, and that management methods such as ingredient supply principles and random testing can keep current schoolchildren's lunches safe. As for the future? Officials of the K-12 Education Administration, about to get a new boss, could only say: highly controversial imported meat products are not encouraged to enter campuses.

Judging from the written materials, none of the aforementioned documents has reference value: the National Health Research Institutes study focused on beef consumption by Taiwanese people of various age groups, did not design its research with pork as the target, and also shows no research data aimed at high-risk groups such as young children and schoolchildren; and the Ministry of Education's report evades the crucial points: for example, the so-called principle that ingredients such as pork for meals should carry the CAS mark is only a "principle," with no comprehensive implementation seen, and there is even less survey statistical data that can answer how many counties and cities, schools, and teachers and students currently receive meat that is not from CAS sources. Existing materials simply cannot reflect the loopholes in campus lunch ingredient control from the central to the local level, let alone strictly guard against lean-meat American pork in the future!

The Kuomintang administrative team about to step down may have been lazy and blunt, or may have played dumb and let things rot; in any case, the Ministry of Education gave such a crude answer that even a pig's brain, no matter which country it was produced in, would know that the whole set of rhetoric about "meat market segmentation" and "labeling the country of origin" as applied to campus lunches is nothing but fooling adults and children alike.

Why are the problems that the National Health Research Institutes and the Ministry of Education failed to address important?

People's right to dietary choice may rest with individuals, but campus lunches, which bear on the health and nutrition of the next generation, cannot be controlled by individuals. Take, for example, the school lunches in Pingtung County, where both Tsao Chi-hung and Chen Bao-ji hail from. Checking the five-day menu of an elementary school in Linbian Township from March 1 to 7, the teachers and students ate dishes such as diced pork in tomato sauce, kimchi pork, teppanyaki pork strips, shredded pork stir-fried with cabbage, and Cantonese congee, with a total of eight dishes including pork in the dishes and soups. The April menu of Xinnan Elementary School in Zhuangwei, Yilan, the alma mater of new Education Minister Pan Wen-chung, excluding off-campus teaching and vegetarian days, provided a total of 18 pork-containing dishes over 14 days. The above are not special cases. Judging from menu statistics across schools, there is even no shortage of a high frequency of up to 1.8 pork dishes per meal. Compared with other sources of meat protein, pork towers at the top of Taiwan schoolchildren's nutritional lunches, while chicken, fish, and beef cannot remotely catch up.

Which country in the world, like Taiwan, feeds its children pork at such high frequency and in such large portions?

Although in 2012 the Codex Alimentarius Commission passed ractopamine residue standards by vote in a rare departure from consensus decision-making, the doubts of the EU and other countries about its safety risks have never loosened; to this day, credible long-term and comprehensive scientific research data on animals and humans remain lacking, and internationally there is still no visible low-dose systematic research data addressing the consumption risks of diverse dietary habits.

Before there is any long-term, comprehensive, rigorous scientific research and health risk assessment on young children, schoolchildren, and adolescents consuming ractopamine, what position are parents and the public supposed to use to agree to lean-meat American pork being imported into Taiwan and driving straight into the bellies of the next generation?

If experts believe that in the field of epidemiology it is impossible to conduct research on minors' exposure to ractopamine in a humane way, does that not precisely confirm that grand talk of scientific evidence and a research basis on this issue is untrustworthy, unreliable, and impossible?

For a tiny state like Taiwan negotiating trade with an international hegemon, the response is inherently a matter of give-and-take and maneuvering at every step. At the end of March, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) report on Taiwan's trade barriers once again named and expressed concern about ractopamine American pork and beef offal, which can be described as clear pressure on the new government. But before the previous administration's deep-seated ills that repeatedly damaged public food safety and local agriculture and livestock have been resolved with any resolve, the promised independent scientific evidence and national consumption risk assessment cannot even be seen as a shadow, and the yet-to-take-office minister has already stepped forward to fire the first shot for the incoming president and cabinet in defense of opening to American pork. This is very clearly the first chapter of a formal pledge of allegiance to the United States.

Standing before the shrine tablet of Taiwan-US economic and trade interests above all, eight years of Kuomintang black-box rot squandered the nation's health and trust; before May 20 has even arrived, the new DPP cabinet has already publicly shown loyalty and laid down its arms to the United States, fully demonstrating its sincerity that American pork must be opened. Is the risk assessment on whether to import lean-meat American pork a true-or-false question of "whether to open," or a multiple-choice question of "how much to open"? Has it already become an essay question of "how to reverse public opinion and persuade consumers to accept it together"?