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.
The US Senate’s passage of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which urges Taiwan’s inclusion in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise and allocates US$1 billion in military aid, marks yet another milestone in Washington’s growing support for Taipei. On paper, it reflects the steadiness of US commitment, but beneath this show of solidarity lies contradiction. While the US Congress builds a stable, bipartisan architecture of deterrence, US President Donald Trump repeatedly undercuts it through erratic decisions and transactional diplomacy. This dissonance not only weakens the US’ credibility abroad — it also fractures public trust within Taiwan. For decades,
The government and local industries breathed a sigh of relief after Shin Kong Life Insurance Co last week said it would relinquish surface rights for two plots in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) to Nvidia Corp. The US chip-design giant’s plan to expand its local presence will be crucial for Taiwan to safeguard its core role in the global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and to advance the nation’s AI development. The land in dispute is owned by the Taipei City Government, which in 2021 sold the rights to develop and use the two plots of land, codenamed T17 and T18, to the
The ceasefire in the Middle East is a rare cause for celebration in that war-torn region. Hamas has released all of the living hostages it captured on Oct. 7, 2023, regular combat operations have ceased, and Israel has drawn closer to its Arab neighbors. Israel, with crucial support from the United States, has achieved all of this despite concerted efforts from the forces of darkness to prevent it. Hamas, of course, is a longtime client of Iran, which in turn is a client of China. Two years ago, when Hamas invaded Israel — killing 1,200, kidnapping 251, and brutalizing countless others
Taiwan’s first case of African swine fever (ASF) was confirmed on Tuesday evening at a hog farm in Taichung’s Wuci District (梧棲), trigging nationwide emergency measures and stripping Taiwan of its status as the only Asian country free of classical swine fever, ASF and foot-and-mouth disease, a certification it received on May 29. The government on Wednesday set up a Central Emergency Operations Center in Taichung and instituted an immediate five-day ban on transporting and slaughtering hogs, and on feeding pigs kitchen waste. The ban was later extended to 15 days, to account for the incubation period of the virus
RSS