President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) instructed the executive and legislative branches yesterday to send representatives to Washington to mend fences after the US government warned that legislative moves to bar imports of some US beef and beef products would “constitute a unilateral abrogation of a bilateral agreement concluded in good faith” just two months ago.

On Tuesday, lawmakers from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) agreed that no ground beef or bovine offal from the US would be allowed to enter Taiwan. The DPP caucus accepted a revised KMT motion to amend the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法) that would ban imports of “risky” substances, including brains, eyes, spinal cords, intestines, ground beef and other related beef products from areas in which mad cow disease has been reported in the past decade.