Taipei, June 10 (CNA) The government hopes the controversy over its partial ban on American beef imports will not hinder a potential resumption of Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) negotiations with the United States before the end of the year, a foreign affairs official said Thursday.
"For Taiwan, the U.S. beef issue is closed, but apparently this is not the case for the U.S. Hopefully, it will not affect the TIFA negotiations," said Harry Tseng, director-general of the Department of North American Affairs under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Chairman Raymond Burghardt told a media roundtable in Taipei June 4 that the beef row is a "lingering issue" because U.S. senators and the U.S. government see Taiwan's market as still not totally open to U.S. beef due to "non-scientific" reasoning.
Taiwan's legislature passed an amendment in January to the Act Governing Food Safety that bans imports of various beef products from countries with documented cases of mad cow disease in the past decade. The amendment effectively bars U.S. ground beef, beef offal and other beef parts such as skulls and eyes from Taiwan's market, in contravention of a bilateral beef trade protocol signed by the two countries last October.
Tseng said that the banned items -- ground beef, beef offal and other parts -- only account for a few percent of Taiwan's U.S. beef imports and that U.S. beef exporters have made profits from the Taiwanese market since the Taiwan-U.S. beef protocol went into effect.
"Hopefully, that will ease some of the opposition (to the partial ban), " he said.
Tseng also expressed hope that the TIFA talks will resume before the end of the year -- as Burghardt mentioned in the media roundtable -- because "it's not worthwhile for both the U.S. and Taiwan to let other economic and trade issues be kidnapped by the beef dispute" as the trade volume of U.S. beef is only a tiny part of the total two-way trade volume.
On the TIFA talks, Burghardt said Taiwan and the U.S. have agreed that the last round of talks under the TIFA -- a deputy ministerial meeting held in July 2007 -- was too long ago and that new talks should take place before the end of the year.
Taiwan and the U.S. both understand the importance of the TIFA negotiations because they cover a wide range of topics related to bilateral economic relations, Tseng said, adding that the talks would provide a much-needed platform for both sides to resolve economic and trade problems. (By Chris Wang) ENDITEM/J