The government on Tuesday announced the lifting of a ban on most food imports from Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture and surrounding areas, initially implemented over concerns of contamination following the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster.
The announcement had been expected since a failed referendum on the reinstatement of an import ban on pork containing traces of ractopamine in December last year.
The government has since then been expected to focus on negotiating international trade agreements, especially joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which the ban on Japanese food imports might have jeopardized.
No government engaged in trade negotiations would be criticized for taking a science-based, rational stand against imports that place its constituents at risk, while a government that impedes fair trade practices for purely populist or irrational reasons would rightfully face criticism.
Food safety is far more important than trade considerations. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) late last year said that her administration would decide whether to lift the ban based on rational, objective, science-based data and international food safety standards.
For the past seven years, the Japanese government has tested large quantities of produce from the areas near the Fukushima plant for radioactivity, with 99.8 to 99.9 percent of those tested passing.
Radioactivity tests conducted in other parts of Japan have the same pass rate, showing that the risk posed by the currently banned imports would be negligible.
In Taiwan, agricultural imports from other parts of Japan have been tested and found to fulfill food safety standards. To treat the produce from Fukushima and surrounding areas differently and maintaining the ban would have no scientific justification.
Announcing the policy change at a news conference, the government said that standards applied to imports from those areas would be stricter than those agreed upon internationally, and that instead of the current blanket ban, some products, such as mushrooms, would need further certificates and be tested at the border.
Food safety is fundamentally the job of government: It is not ideological, and it should not be political.
Taiwanese should be able to rely on their politicians, whether in government or in opposition, to ensure food safety.
Political parties should be interested in providing the public with the unadulterated, science-based truth about food imports, not hysterical, politically driven appeals to people’s natural — and certainly, given Taiwan’s record on food safety issues, justifiable — concerns.
Branding produce from Fukushima and nearby areas as “nuclear food” a decade after the disaster is damaging, disingenuous, dishonest, counterproductive and childish.
This is especially true when the vast majority of governments around the world have long been satisfied with safety checks implemented in Japan showing that initial concerns were unfounded, and the risk posed by produce from the areas is negligible or nonexistent.
Now that the Tsai administration has announced that it would lift the ban, it is the responsibility of opposition parties to ensure that the government keeps its promises, implements rigorous testing standards and does not prioritize economic or political factors over strict adherence to them, rather than stirring up public concerns for unfounded reasons that they do not believe themselves.
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