Taipei, June 4 (CNA) The controversy surrounding Taiwan's partial ban on beef imports from the U.S. is not resolved but won't affect the countries' strong trade relationship, American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Chairman Raymond F. Burghardt said Friday.
Burghardt told a media roundtable that the beef row was 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.
In January, Taiwan's legislature passed an amendment to the Act Governing Food Safety that banned imports of specific beef products from countries with documented cases of mad cow disease in the past decade. The amendment effectively barred U.S. ground beef, beef offal and other beef parts such as the skull, eyes and intestines from Taiwan's market, in contravention of a bilateral beef trade protocol signed by the two countries last October.
Burghardt said, however, that U.S. beef "is coming in and doing well (on Taiwan's market) and people are buying bone-in and boneless beef... It would be nice to see the market totally open."
Moreover, he said, the fact that Taiwan is the U.S.'s ninth-largest trading partner and sixth-largest market for agricultural products says a lot about the countries' bilateral trade relations. (By Chris Wang) enditem/bc