The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday officially announced the cancelation of the requirement for a certificate of origin for Japanese food imports to Taiwan, effective immediately.
It means that food products from five prefectures — Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Chiba — would be fully deregulated and subject to the same management standards as food from other countries. Experts emphasize that future management should still be adjusted on a rolling basis.
According to FDA statistics, Taiwan has conducted more than 270,000 border radiation inspections on Japanese food products since 2011, with a failure rate of 0 percent. Based on the latest risk assessment, the radiation exposure to the Taiwanese public from Japanese food is considered “negligible.”
Photo: REUTERS
FDA Director-General Chiang Chih-kang (姜至剛) said that this adjustment was made based on international and domestic scientific evidence.
According to publicly available information from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Japanese government has established a comprehensive monitoring system and adjusts domestic regulatory measures on a rolling basis according to testing results, effectively ensuring the safety of the food supply chain, he said.
Under the principle of ensuring food safety for the public, scientific evidence and international standards, the review of Japanese food products would return to source-based management and general border sampling, Chiang said.
No objections were received during the consultation period, and thus the adjustment is now officially aligned with the approach used for other countries, with sampling and inspection based on food risk classification, he said.
The only countries and territories still applying special regulations to Japanese food are China, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea and Russia.
President William Lai (賴清德) on Thursday responded to China’s suspension of Japanese seafood imports by sharing photos on social media of himself enjoying miso soup and sushi made with seafood from Kagoshima and Hokkaido.
Chiang said the timing was entirely coincidental.
“It just happens that the administrative process has reached this point,” he said.
Regarding the full deregulation of food from the five prefectures, Yen Tzung-hai (顏宗海), director of the Clinical Toxicology Center at Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, yesterday said that this change simply shifts the food from “special control” back to “general management.”
Radiation safety standards have not been relaxed in any way, he said, adding that Taiwan still maintains the regulation that the total amount of cesium-134 and cesium-137 in food must not exceed 100 becquerel per kilogram.
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