January 15, 2021

Taiwan's FDA stands by accuracy of online pork data tracker

Taiwan's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defended its online pork data tracker on January 11 amid accusations of inaccuracy, saying its pork dashboard only included imports that have been cleared for sale and not including those under customs review.

The FDA website began publishing daily updates on pork production and imports on the dashboard on January 4, including statistics itemised by country of origin on type of meat and the amount of ractopamine by batch and weight.

Local media reported that data from the FDA dashboard on January 7 showed that there had been no pork product imports from the United States, and imports were only coming from Canada, Denmark and Spain.

However, FDA border food inspection data indicated that five batches of US pork products weighing 108.8 tonnes were imported on January 4. Data from the border inspection system did not indicate if the pork products were tested for ractopamine.

According to the FDA, its border inspection system displays the number of imports under inspection.

The FDA said: "Before the Taiwan Customs Administration releases imports to market, they still need to pass inspections from other agencies, such as animal disease testing by the Council of Agriculture."

"If the imports have not been released by customs, then they have not yet entered the market and would therefore not appear on the dashboard, as only data about products on the market are relevant to consumers," FDA added.

The agency said it would update the pork dashboard to integrate data on pork imports and levels of ractopamine from other agencies.

On January 11, the FDA dashboard showed that 47.18 tonnes of US pork and 49.01 tonnes of US pork products had been imported with no traces of ractopamine.

 - Taipei Times