The entire world seems to be experiencing a harrowing June, with every meal and every beverage potentially posing lethal danger, and panic is spreading.

The United States and Europe have faced a terrible scare from what's been described as the most lethal E.coli bacteria ever. In Asia, because of the eruption in Taiwan of the "most serious plasticizer contamination in human history," even people in South Korea and Singapore are worried.

"The whole world is troubled by food and beverage safety," says risk control expert Jhou Guei-tian, a professor in National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of National Development.  

Once food safety is compromised, not only do economic losses spread from the food sector to other industries, but consumer confidence can also be completely undermined and a country's image tarnished.

Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang estimates that Taiwan's recent plasticizer scandal will generate losses of "NT$10 billion at the very least." Domestic sales of sports and tea drinks, which usually total over NT$100 billion a year, could fall an estimated 10-20 percent, and a similarly heavy blow may be dealt to the export market, worth between NT$600 million and NT$900 million a year.

In fact, the scandal sparked by plasticizers – chemical additives used in plastics to give them better workability, durability and other temperature resistance properties – was not unavoidable.

The Failure to Heed Warnings

If anybody has the right to feel frustrated over the scandal's outbreak, it is Cheng Jen-hung, a member of the Control Yuan, a branch of Taiwan's government that can investigate and censure public servants or government agencies for negligent or illicit behavior.

In describing the incident, Cheng could not help repeating the word "regrettable" as he held in his hand a copy of the Control Yuan's report from three years ago on safety controls and regulations for foods using additives.

After China's melamine-tainted milk crisis spread to Taiwan in 2008, the Control Yuan censured the government for its approach in dealing with the crisis's fallout and with food safety in general, citing five specific areas of negligence: inadequate checks, inconsistent policies, disorderly emergency responses, the lack of necessary mechanisms, and mismanagement of the problem.

In its investigative report on food additives, the Control Yuan also made a clear demand: "The Department of Health and the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs should jointly audit and manage industrial chemical manufacturers and other sources." The incumbent Control Yuan members even called for 13 corrective measures and made eight major suggestions that they asked administrative agencies to review.

But of the two premiers and four health ministers who have served over the past three years, "none made food safety a real priority," says Cheng, shaking his head.

Though public officials come and go, the people's health cannot be ignored. The government was warned of flaws in the system but did not take immediate action, allowing Taiwan's food safety to get out of control throughout the supply chain.

Now that the scandal has erupted, what can be learned from it and how can the crisis be turned into opportunity?  

Even Unprocessed Foods Not Seen as Safe

If anything, the food safety scare has pulled the lid off Taiwan's ineffective food safety controls.

For a long time, food additives made from chemical compounds have permeated many of the foods and beverages we ingest every day. But plasticizers have not only been illegally added into food additives, as was the case in the most recent scandal. They have even found their way into "real food" and pose a hidden danger.

The mud in every single river in Taiwan has tested positive for contamination – 3.5 parts per million per kilogram on average – with the phthalate-based plasticizer DEHP (di (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate), the chemical at the heart of the recent scandal. The amount was 100 times that of any other chemical substances, and anybody who eats a fish from the river is likely to ingest more of the toxic chemical than the maximum permissible value.

Ching-chang Lee, the director of the Research Center for Environmental Trace Toxic Substances at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), who has researched environmental hormones, surveyed rivers from around Taiwan between 2001 and 2010. In his recently completed report on the background environmental distribution of toxic chemical substances, he concluded that the presence of DEHP in riverbeds is still on the rise. In many of the rivers of northern Taiwan, two to three times more of the substance is present now than 10 years ago.

When the extremely busy Lee, who rarely breaks for lunch, was interviewed by CommonWealth Magazine, he eyed the box lunch in front of him but did not touch it. He said the amount of toxic chemical substances in rivers around the world are usually measured in the "parts per billion," but in Taiwan they are more commonly found in the "parts per million," a difference of a factor of 1,000.

His research team also discovered that fewer fish than ever could be caught in Taiwan's rivers, and tests on river fish found they contained an average of 0.23 parts per million of DEHP, with a high of 1.7 ppm. The United States has set the maximum permissible concentration of DEHP at 1.2 ppm for a 66-kilo adult.

But DEHP is not the only contaminant present in the bodies of river fish. Fish taken from the Danshui River in the north, the Dajia River in central Taiwan, and the Beigang River in southern Taiwan were all found to have high concentrations of nonylphenol (used in surface-active agents found in cleansers). Fish from the Keelung River in Taipei and the Erren Stream in Tainan contained bisphenol A, a chemical found in plastic products said to interfere with hormone systems in humans. The European Union and Canada have banned its use in baby bottles.

The Highest Concentration of Plastics in the World

Taiwan's exposure to environmental plasticizers may be the highest in the world.

"About 50 percent of the building materials and decorations in houses are made of PVC," says Hu Sheng-hai, the director of the Taiwan Plastics Industry Association, significant because 30-50 percent of PVC formulas are plasticizers.

Taiwan uses 250,000 tons to 400,000 tons of DEHP alone per year, and, according to Lee's survey, "about 1 percent of it gets released into the environment."

Sofas, power cables for computers, soft floors played on by children and even strongly fragrant body wash and shampoo can also release DEHP. The concentration of DEHP in dust found in Taiwan's household environments has also been found to be the highest in the world.

But the chemical substances found in our bodies still originate primarily from the food we eat. Ling Yong-Chien, a chemistry professor at Tsing Hua University, says phthalate-based plasticizers are fat-soluble and the most likely to be brought into a person's body through food.

Aside from additives and contaminants, convenient food packaging is also a factor that cannot be ignored.

Walk into any Taiwanese convenience store and what you see are box lunches packed in plastic boxes and rice balls packed in plastic wrappers. Of the nearly 2,000 products found in a typical convenience store, "more than 90 percent have plastic packaging," admits one chain store operator. The low cost and convenience of plastics remain indispensable to many manufacturers to this day.

Even substituting paper cups for plastic cups won't keep plastics away, because the insides of most paper cups are coated with plastic material containing hazardous substances that can easily seep into the cup's contents.

Taiwanese Unsafe from the Day They Are Born

After plasticizers enter the body, they are normally flushed out within 48 hours. But in Taiwan, Lee says, "The rate at which they enter the body exceeds the rate at which people's metabolism can eliminate them." A three-year study conducted by the NCKU professor found that the concentration of DEHP metabolites (substances produced during metabolism) in pregnant Taiwanese women was four to 13 times higher than that found in their American counterparts, putting members of the next generation in an unsafe environment even before they are born.

In 2008 Mei-Lien Chen, a professor with National Yang Ming University's Institute of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, published a paper in Environment International on the exposure of Taiwanese to phthalates. Based on urine samples from 60 Taiwanese, she found that the average concentration of DEHP metabolites was 16 nanograms (one billionth of a gram) per cubic centimeter, five times higher than in the United States and six times higher than in Germany.

Despite exposure to plastics likely being higher in Taiwan than in any other country, the government has yet to draw the line on toxic substances and set, for example, maximum permissible intake levels for DEHP. The United States and Japan have long had DEHP standards, set at 1.2 ppm and 8.4 ppm, respectively.

Materials, Manufacturing, Branding, Distribution All Culpable

"Everybody needs to look at themselves critically and ask, ‘What have we done wrong?'" Lucy Sun Hwang, a professor with National Taiwan University's Institute of Food Science and Technology, says emphatically. From the government and the private sector to end consumers, people must ponder, "What is the proper way to do things?"

Most urgently in need of change are food product manufacturers, which have been collectively branded by the scandal as unscrupulous operators.

"From raw material suppliers, and manufacturers, to brand vendors and distributors – they are all in on this," says NTU's Jhou Guei-tian, each word conveying the anger of a typical consumer.

If Taiwan wants to overcome structural flaws, food companies need to start strengthening their management of raw material suppliers and their outsourcing supply chains.

Convenience stores and food chains are everywhere in Taiwan, and these distributors also have a decisive role to play in food safety.

"Since retailers and distributors earn high distribution fees from suppliers or manufacturers, they should more strictly audit those upstream companies," says Shiang-tang Jane, the head of the planning office of the Food Industry Research and Development Institute.

The secretary-general of the Taiwan Chain Stores and Franchise Association, Winnie Hung, said retailers and distributors learned the value of investing in tracking quality back through the supply chain from the recent scandal, when they were faced with challenges in product testing, shelf management, employee training and contingency management.

One example was Family Mart convenience stores, which have expanded testing of their plastic box lunch containers to cover six chemicals, from the two originally stipulated in regulations.

"The law had never included those in their regulations, but when it comes to the gray areas that have consumers concerned, we also had to deal with the situation as quickly as possible," says Esther Lin, Family Mart's director of public relations and brand promotion.

Three Things the Government Must Do

1. Execution: Central planning is essential.

Food safety management cannot be treated like a birthday cake, cut up into individual slices. The Cabinet must institute an integrated mechanism, because food safety involves the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), the Department of Health (DOH), the Council of Agriculture (COA) and the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA).

The EPA, for instance, was slow in reclassifying DEHP and other potential harmful plasticizers from Class 4 toxic chemical substances to Class 1 or 2, which carry much more stringent restrictions, to strengthen the control of materials at their source.

Once the scandal erupted, the EPA quickly moved to reclassify plasticizers in response to outside pressure. Plasticizers categorized as Class 4 substances meant that companies had to report transactions of the toxic substances only after they were completed, but under the tougher classification, potential deliveries must be reported and approved by the EPA before they can be made. The system will give the government control over the volumes and movements of these substances.

Beyond strengthening controls, the government must also strengthen its awareness.

NTU's Lee believes the EPA should conduct more detailed audits and crosschecks of chemical deliveries, and whenever it discovers that factories using toxic chemicals are actually producing food items, it can immediately notify Taiwan's Food and Drug Administration. "Only then can we call it a fully functional government," Lee says.

The MOEA, which is responsible for GMP (good manufacturing practices) certification, and the COA, which handles CAS (certified agricultural standards) certification, must also get more involved. Rather than simply awarding certificates and then not following up, they need to enforce compliance through tracking management.

2. Funding and Manpower: Provide Sufficient Ammunition.

Funding and manpower for the key food safety and toxic chemical management agencies – the Department of Health and the EPA – have long been inadequate.

More than 100,000 chemical substances are used in the domestic market, of which 271 are listed as toxic. The section of the EPA's Department of Environmental Sanitation and Toxic Substances responsible for controlling permits has to supervise more than 10,000 factories, but it has only three people and an annual budget of NT$10 million. As a result, "we can only pick out the important ones to supervise," says department head Lin Chien-huei.

In 2010, Taiwan's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was finally formed from existing agencies to give food and drug safety a higher priority, but Lin Ja-liang, a clinical toxicology specialist at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Linkou was cited by a local newspaper as describing the new agency as a "big fraud."

The creation of the FDA was supposed to make the promotion of food and drug safety more efficient by bringing existing agencies under one roof and attracting more resources. But after the FDA's inception, the manpower allocated to the Division of Food Safety rose only marginally, from 29 to 34 people, and the division was given an operational budget of NT$120 million, or NT$5.21 per capita, for food safety.

As for the overall budget for administration, spending was only NT$11 per capita in 2008 when food safety was still managed by the Bureau of Food Sanitation, far below Japan (NT$45), the U.S. (NT$160) and Hong Kong (NT$458). The number rose dramatically in 2010, when the Bureau was transformed into the new FDA, to NT2.3 billion, or about NT$100 per capita. But personnel and technology costs accounted for the vast majority of the budget, which also funded drug testing and drug management, leaving little for food safety.  

3. Legal Issues: Time to Get Strict.

In the past, the government and businesses generally believed that strict regulation of the food industry would inhibit its development and hold back economic growth, efficiency and convenience, but NTU's Jhou Guei-tian believes that when it comes to food risk issues, putting economic expediency ahead of regulation is the wrong approach.

"Only through strict controls can you forge the development of a new industry. Loosening regulations only encourages procrastination," Jhou says. One example is that if the government were to require businesses to strengthen testing, more testing labs would be established to provide services to both companies and the public.

Taiwan's recent food safety scare has brought to light a problem that has apparently existed for more than two decades. Though it has shocked consumers, it has also offered the government and the food industry a prime opportunity to strengthen food safety procedures and management. Taiwan's consumers are wondering if the opportunity will be seized.

Translated from the Chinese by Luke Sabatier