TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Preparing these columns requires closely following the local news across the political spectrum to get a broad understanding of events as they unfold, and the number of browser bookmarks this produces is on an industrial scale.
To help find articles and research on specific topics, tags are an absolute necessity. If you had to guess what tag has been used the most extensively this election cycle, what would it be?
It is "eggs." Yes, the humble food item that miraculously pops out of virgin chickens and ends up in danbings and McMuffins. If asked last year what I would have predicted as the top tag for this election cycle, this would not have been it.
Yet it is not really surprising, either. Eggs are a cheap, basic, staple necessity for the majority of the population, and as such have all the attributes to take on a symbolic role.
There have been a string of interconnected and intertwined controversies involving eggs since at least February. Throughout the whole saga, a surprisingly long list of hot-button issues in Taiwan were touched upon: protecting the poor, local farmers, alleged collusion and corruption, potential fraud, government waste and incompetence, and food safety.
It also has been a protracted, messy, and at times bitter and brutal saga, but in the end illustrates why democracy is so effective as a form of government. The whole story is too complicated to cover here, so we will need to summarize.
Rotten eggs
Taiwan works very, very hard to keep avian flu out of the country. Whenever it is detected at a location, all birds there will be culled, often in the tens of thousands. The problem is, unlike other livestock diseases like foot-and-mouth disease and African swine fever, avian flu comes in on the wing and cannot be entirely kept out.
This meant that daily local production had dropped below daily demand, causing prices to spike. Being such a basic necessity, this caused a big stir and was big news.
The press was full of stories about the hardships this was bringing to the common person, and about how big of a hardship this was on those with limited incomes. Opposition parties in the legislature blamed the government for mismanaging the situation.
The then-Council of Agriculture had to “do something,” and hatched a plan to import eggs to make up for the shortfall to bring prices under control. They contracted a handful of companies to provide the imports, including one very dubious one called Ultra Source Ltd. (超思) that in the end would leave the administration with an egg on its face.
Ultra Source was founded just last September with a registered capital of only NT$500,000 (US$15,564). Ultra Source changed its operational status to "temporarily closed" on Feb. 24, the day the ministry announced the egg import program, and yet the company was awarded an importation contract on March 1, before it became operational again on March 2.
If that was not odd enough, this seemingly fly-by-night company was given the biggest orders of the nine approved importers by far, importing 88.14 million of the 140 million eggs imported in total. That is a lot of eggs in one mysterious basket.
According to the now-renamed Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), the company made NT$38 million (US$1.18 million) in profits.
Egg on the administration's face
This raised a lot of questions. Why was this company given so much business over more established food importers?
Was corruption involved? Is this some sort of sweetheart deal to a friend of the party or Agriculture Minister Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲)?
So far, there has been no proof of any corruption or personal ties to the government. Even if the MOA has been completely honest, it still raises questions about how this company was seemingly so favored by the administration.
Questions also began to be raised about the importation process, and under pressure in the legislature and walking on eggshells with the press, the MOA had to admit that 37.18% of the imported eggs, amounting to 54.02 million, had been damaged or reached their expiry date, leading to their destruction. This raises a lot of questions.
Of those 37%, if they were damaged that would indicate serious incompetence on the part of the importers. However, it appears more likely that the bulk had expired.
“Future eggs” from Brazil
Eggs were imported from Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, the U.S. and Turkey. However, the bulk came from Brazil.
Looking at shipping routes, Brazil is the furthest country on the planet from Taiwan to ship goods. So, perishable eggs had to be shipped from farms, assembled and packaged, transported across Brazil, shipped to Taiwan, sit in customs, inspected, washed, labeled, packaged for local retail sale, and transported to stores across Taiwan.
No wonder so many expired. Fortunately, the MOA did not sell any expired eggs.
Well, at least not intentionally. It turned out that many of the eggs were mislabelled, putting the expiry dates well past what they were supposed to be.
Local governments began to inspect egg washing and packaging companies, and irregularities were found involving domestic egg labeling as well. Here in Taichung, inspectors noticed eggs labeled as the day after, which the press labeled “future eggs.”
The furor over all these controversies finally led Agriculture Minister Chen to resign to take responsibility. The premier has also bowed and apologized three times already.
Political outrage kabuki theater
This whole process followed the typical political outrage kabuki theater playbook. The opposition spread memes, flooded the media with suspicions and speculation, egging each other on to appear the most outraged in the press, and loudly castigated and questioned the administration in the legislature.
Politicians from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) reflexively defended Chen and the administration and accused the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) of politicizing the issue for partisan gain.
The KMT and TPP defended themselves by saying they were just providing oversight. So which side is correct? Both, of course, and it gets to the brilliance of a functioning democratic system.
In any government, there are conspiracies and factions scheming to seize power. In autocratic governments, they operate behind the scenes in a cloak-and-dagger manner.
In democracies, our conspiracies to seize power are transparent and out in the open. We call them political parties.
They have to register, identify their leaders, and publish their finances for all to see. If they do seize power, the top leaders all have to publish their personal assets, which the public can access.
To win power, they need to win over voters. One of the best ways to do this when in opposition is to dig up dirt on the ruling administration.
This adversarial system means that it is the self-interest of opposition parties to provide oversight, which they can then politicize for partisan gain. It is messy, noisy, contentious, and sometimes exhausting, but it produces results.
Grateful for the opposition
Because of the opposition, things will improve. In this case, new safety regulations and limits on how far away eggs can be imported from are being considered.
This also served notice to the administration that they are being carefully scrutinized. That has powerful knock-on effects in terms of government honesty, integrity, and internal oversight. It is expensive politically to get caught out.
While I am pan-green writing for a pan-green news outlet, I applaud the opposition for raising questions and doing their job and hope that many DPP city and county councilors are providing the same function in the many local governments run by the KMT or TPP.
At the end of the day, regardless of personal partisan leanings, we all want good government. For that, we need opposition, who we may not always agree with ideologically, but are necessary.
In authoritarian states like China, if questions were raised about a cabinet minister potentially involved in corruption or incompetence, mismanagement and possibly putting food safety at risk, nothing would change or improve in the slightest. You would just see your Weibo account sanitized and a jail cell waiting.
Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) is a regular contributing columnist for Taiwan News, the central Taiwan correspondent for ICRT FM100 Radio News, co-publisher of Compass Magazine, co-founder of Taiwan Report (report.tw) and former chair of the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce. For more columns by the author, click here. Follow him on X (prev. Twitter): @donovan_smith.
