Japan and South Korea have found one more thing to lock horns over.
This time it’s not islands or wartime history, it’s fish.
Japan’s government has said it will debate South Korea’s partial ban on Japanese marine products over fears of radiation next week at a World Trade Organization meeting in Switzerland.
Japanese government officials will present their case to the Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures in Geneva, an official from the country’s fisheries agency told JRT.
Japan will present our case that there is no scientific basis for the ban, said the official. We hope that by explaining our stance and having a discussion, South Korea will choose to repeal the ban of its own accord.
South Korea has had a ban on all fishery imports from eight prefectures in northern Japan since last month due to concerns about a leak of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Seoul also tightened safety inspections on imported fishery products by lowering the maximum permissible level of radiation to 100 Becquerels per kilogram from 370.
The full-fledged South Korean ban is tougher than Seoul’s previous import restriction on 50 kinds of fishery products from the prefectures of Fukushima, Gunma, Miyagi, Iwate, Tochigi, Chiba and Aomori in Japan.
The eight areas exported 5,000 metric tons of fishery products to South Korea last year, accounting for 22% of the total 23,000-ton Japanese fishery shipment, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in Seoul.
After the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011, China and Taiwan were ahead of South Korea in banning the imports of seafood, dairy and vegetable products from Japan. Seoul has complained that Tokyo has been neither accurate nor timely in providing information on radiation leaks.
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