President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said he would honor the legislature’s decision to amend a food safety law even though it would contravene a bilateral beef trade protocol signed by Taiwan and the US in October. The president, however, was evasive about who should be held responsible for the about-face.

“The top priority at the moment is to find out how the US government will react to the legislature’s decision and minimize the damage,” Ma said at a press conference at the Presidential Office yesterday afternoon after the legislature in the morning passed an amendment to the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法), banning imports of specific beef products from countries with documented cases of mad cow disease in the past decade.