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.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
As the new year dawns, Taiwan faces a range of external uncertainties that could impact the safety and prosperity of its people and reverberate in its politics. Here are a few key questions that could spill over into Taiwan in the year ahead. WILL THE AI BUBBLE POP? The global AI boom supported Taiwan’s significant economic expansion in 2025. Taiwan’s economy grew over 7 percent and set records for exports, imports, and trade surplus. There is a brewing debate among investors about whether the AI boom will carry forward into 2026. Skeptics warn that AI-led global equity markets are overvalued and overleveraged
RSS