Japan prepares for marketing campaign to promote food products in UK
The Scottish, English and Welsh parliaments all passed legislation late last month to remove all import restrictions on food and drink products from areas of Japan that had been affected by the nuclear plant accident. by Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.
The development comes around six months after it was reported that the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) had published a risk assessment report on the radiological risks to human health if restrictions were removed, which has had very positive results in favor of Japan.
The Japanese regions affected by the nuclear incident were Fukushima, Miyagi, Nagano, Gunma, Ibaraki, Yamanashi, Yamagata, Shizuoka and Niigata. After the accident, a total of 55 countries around the world implemented sanctions, restrictions and import bans on products from these prefectures, including the UK.
This latest development does not apply to Northern Ireland, which continues to apply EU restrictions, but overall it has effectively opened up Japan’s access to the UK market with far fewer barriers. than before, which led the first to receive this news with understandable joy.
“This removal of import restrictions by the UK will serve as a great encouragement to traders and consumers in the affected areas, and the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) sincerely welcomes them.” , MAFF wrote in an official statement.
“We see this deregulation as a great opportunity and will take the initiative to actively promote the export of [Japanese] food, drink, agricultural, forestry and fishery products in the UK based on the idea of market-in (satisfaction of consumer demands and needs).
“More than 10 years have passed since the nuclear accident, and now only 13 countries continue to apply import restrictions and/or bans on food and drink products from disaster-affected prefectures. Japan will continue to work to have them removed.
According to MAFF data, of the 55 countries that introduced restrictions and bans in 2011, 42 have lifted all measures on food and drink imports, including markets with notoriously strict food safety authorities like Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, as well as most of the United States. United States and now the United Kingdom.
Of the remaining 13 countries, eight (including the EU, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Indonesia) have removed total import bans in favor of test certificate requirements, and only five have still import bans in place, namely China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao.
“The main products affected are rice, vegetables and fruits, tea, medicinal plants, milk and dairy products, meat (beef, pork and poultry), fish products and processed foods, and we still have work to do. [especially for the remaining countries to regain full confidence] in fruits, vegetables and fish products,the ministry said.
“But so far, more than 75% of all countries that had introduced import measures on Japanese food following the nuclear accident have eliminated those measures, [and we see] no reason we can’t [get the remaining markets to do the same with time].”
Online request and justification
On the same day the UK announced the lifting of import restrictions, MAFF also published a 12-page report on its ‘Request and justification for the lifting of import measures on Japanese foodstuffs concerning radionuclides” targeting the remaining countries with restrictions still in place.
In the document, the ministry stressed that control and monitoring measures have been put in place to ensure that food exported out of the regions is safe to eat, and again urged markets to reconsider any remaining sanctions.
“Shortly after the accident, Japan already started decontamination measures [throughout the food supply chain] from cropland to fruit trees and introduced a risk-based dietary monitoring programme; in addition to the establishment of the Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters to control restrictions on food distribution and consumption as well as monitoring plan guidelines,”says MAFF.
“All foods are controlled by prefectural governments based on maximum levels of radiocaesium set by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare and items exceeding these levels are recalled and disposed of – our monitoring has also shown that the levels in [all] major foods are safe for human consumption.
“Japanese food surveillance testing in exporting countries did not detect non-compliance with reference levels until shortly after the accident – non-compliance with Japanese maximum levels (stricter than CODEX levels) has not been detected for more than eight years.
“International authorities such as the FAO/IAEA have already assessed that in Japan the measures and response against radionuclide contamination in food are appropriate and the food supply chain is effectively controlled, [hence] Japan believes that there is no scientific justification for maintaining import measures and requests that they be removed.
