EU to tighten radiation limits on Japan food imports

Vienna (AFP) April 5, 2011 - The European Union is planning to tighten radiation limits on Japanese food imports, Austria's health ministry said Tuesday, citing EU health commissioner John Dalli at a meeting in Hungary.

According to Fabian Fusseis, a spokesman for Austrian Health Minister Alois Stoeger who attended a meeting of EU health ministers in Godollo Castle outside Budapest, Dalli said that stricter radiation limits would be imposed on Japanese food following the disaster at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant.

EU Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso confirmed the plans during a session of the European Parliament in parliament.

"We have a regulation that was established after Chernobyl," Barroso said, referring to the world's worst nuclear accident in Ukraine in 1986.

That regulation was "made based on the best scientific evidence" at the time, he said.

Japan, however, which takes an "extremely sensitive position" in matters of food security, had "a different level, a different threshold than the one we have in Europe," Barroso said.

Thus, "during this period we have decided that on a transitional basis we are going to implement the standards of Japan (where) the levels permitted are lower," he said.

Meanwhile, "we are going to consult the committee of experts on a national and a European level so that we can, if appropriate, establish common uniform rules for all imports," he added.

Such a move was "purely precautionary", Barroso insisted, saying that any readings had shown "negligible" levels of radioactivity that was well below both European and Japanese norms.

The 27-nation bloc wants its current radiation limits to be brought in line with those of Japan in the cases of caesium-134 and caesium-137, Dalli's spokesman Frederic Vincent told AFP.

That would lower the level of permissible contamination to 500 becquerels per kilogramme from 1,250 becquerels per kilogramme at present.

The new limit for iodine-131 would be 2,000 becquerels per kilogramme and for strontium-90 it would be no more than 750 becquerels per kilogramme.

At present, the EU asks the Japanese authorities to check all food exports for radiation while the national authorities of the importing countries monitor at least 10 percent of goods arriving.