Beef boycott kicks off

They took the move yesterday in warm response to a call from Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin to exercise self-management measures to safeguard customers' safety and put their clients at ease despite the central government's consent of relaxing import restrictions on American beef products beginning in mid-November.

Just a day after the Taipei City's Office of Commerce initiated a plan to encourage the city's 15,000 restaurants, supermarket chains, hotels and department stores to form an alliance whose members will boycott the sale or use of internal organs and other parts of U.S. beef, more than 200 stores had already signed up, said Liu Chia-chun, director of the office.

Liu said his office will accept applications between Nov. 11 and Dec. 31 by these stores for an alliance logo they can display in their stores to indicate that they do not supply or use U.S. beef offal, ground beef or spinal cords.

If stores carrying the alliance badge are found to be selling or using these products, they will be stripped of their certificates and fined in accordance with the Consumers Protection Law, he said.

Stores and restaurants that do not join the alliance will be checked randomly and be required to indicate on their packaging or menus the country of origin of their beef, he continued.

To check the import sources, the city government will apply the same monitor measures when some milk powders and cream, coffee powder originating from China were found last year to have been contaminated with melamine, a highly toxic chemical used in plastics.

In addition, trade groups like the Importers and Exporters Association of Taipei, the Taipei County Importers and Exporters Chamber of Commerce, the Kaohsiung Importers and Exporters Chamber of Commerce, the Taiwan Provincial Importers and Exporters Chamber of Commerce, management association at major markets in Taipei and Kaohsiung also voiced support for the campaign launched by Mayor Hau.

Leading beef importers like Mayfull Foods Corp., Shuh Sen Co., Game Meat Industrial Co., retailing chains like Wellcome, and steak house chains including Noble Family said they will continue to import and use U.S. beef but will not touch the internal organs which are unlikely to win patronage of local customers anyway.

Mayor Hau's initiative was interpreted by some as a preemptive tactic to help defuse the mounting attack on the government from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on the beef dispute ahead of the local elections in December.

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