European Union has decided to continue tests and certification of food and feed coming from 11 regions of Japan that could be affected by the Fukushima nuclear radiation.
The imported material from the prefectures of Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Miyagi, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa and Chiba will be subject to verification if it is within safety levels for the presence of caesium-134 and caesium-137 before leaving Japan as well as being subject to random testing upon arrival in the EU until October 31.
At a meeting of the Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health on Friday, Member States' experts endorsed a European Commission proposal to align the maximum levels of caesium-134 and caesium-137 with the new Japanese maximum levels which will apply from April 1.
Feed and food products from the remaining 36 Japanese regions do not need to be tested but must be accompanied by a declaration stating the prefecture of origin, and also remain subject to random testing at the point of entry into the EU.
Applying the same maximum levels in the EU and Japan will continue to provide consistency between the pre-export controls performed by the Japanese authorities and the controls on the level of radionuclides performed on feed and food originating from Japan at the point of entry into the EU.
Sake, whiskey and shochu will be excluded from the scope of these new measures, since the tests that were carried out by the Japanese authorities detected no radioactivity.
The Commission underlined that food safety risks from the nuclear accident in Japan are considerably low in the EU. EU imports from Japan in 2011 represented 1.9% of the total EU agri-food imports.
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