Opinion | A WTO case over China’s ban on Japanese seafood would reverberate beyond Fukushima

If Japan goes through with its threat to lodge a complaint with the world trade body, it could push WTO jurists to make important new rulings on the conditions and extent to which countries can take anti-trade actions to protect life and health

Reading Time:4 minutes

A sign is placed outside a Japanese restaurant in Beijing informing customers that it has suspended the sale of all seafood imported from Japan, on August 27. Photo: AFP

Published: 8:30pm, 19 Sep 2023

The most contentious international trade disputes are often about the safety of food. Japan and China seem about to prove this anew in their dispute over the blanket ban on seafood imports from Japan, imposed by China immediately after the Japanese began to release treated radioactive water from the defunct Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. The outcome of their dispute could break important new ground in international trade law.

Late last month, the Japanese government began discharge of what is anticipated to be 31,200 tons of waste water in a total of four releases from the plant by next March. Before going ahead, Japan got the approval of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which said the planned water release would have a “negligible” impact on people and the environment.

Following the seafood ban, Japan is now threatening legal action against China in the World Trade Organization. Tensions between the two countries, already high, are now higher. Social media in both countries is alive with mutual acrimony, and diplomats of both are not mincing words.

This controversial Japanese action is born of what Tokyo says is necessity. The Japanese government has been trying to put the Fukushima disaster behind it since March 2011, when a 9.0 magnitude earthquake provoked a tsunami that caused the meltdown of three of the plant’s nuclear reactors.

As part of the clean-up, radioactive water has been stored at the plant ever since. But now, more than 1,000 storage tanks are filled to 98 per cent of their capacity of 1.37 million tons and need to be emptied, the Japanese say, so they can continue with decommissioning the plant.

The Japanese plan is to drain the tanks slowly over decades. One problem is that the technology to remove all radioactive elements from the waste water before piping it into the sea does not exist. One radioactive element – tritium – cannot be removed. Instead, the water is being diluted to reduce the tritium content to safe low levels.