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The story
Over the proposed lifting of the ban on imports of fresh U.S. potatoes, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries held a closed-door briefing for Tokachi-region growers in Obihiro, Japan’s top potato-producing city. The ministry says it has already identified 21 species of pests and diseases that could enter the country, and is now moving into the stage of considering specific measures to prevent their introduction. On 5ch, opinions split: some welcomed the move out of frustration with rising domestic potato prices, while growers voiced concern that if nematode damage spreads, it would become ‘irreversible.’
The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, which has been in ongoing talks over lifting the ban on imports of fresh U.S. potatoes, held a briefing for agricultural stakeholders in Obihiro, Japan’s top potato-producing city.
The briefing was held behind closed doors, attended by growers from the Tokachi region and others.
According to the ministry, it explained at the meeting that it has finished identifying 21 species of pests and diseases that pose a risk of entering the country, and will now consider specific measures to prevent their introduction.
Source: topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp / Original article here
What people said
Talk about irresponsible
Do you even know what a 'sanjikan' (ministry counsellor) actually is?
Feels like they used to be a lot cheaper and easier to buy
Potatoes used to be the poster child for cheap vegetables, but the past few years they've gotten full of themselves
People like this will probably just keep complaining even if we can't import food anymore
It's basically the real-life 'chestnut bun' trick, isn't it? (a comedy bit about something multiplying endlessly)
That's exactly the problem
If potatoes can multiply infinitely, so can potato cyst nematodes
Cyst nematodes can't be killed that way
Why insist on fresh, raw ones?
Right, that'd be enough
They're already selling tons of it through McDonald's, and now they're pushing fresh ones too
They must just want to destroy Japanese agriculture
Importing goods irradiated with things like cobalt-60 is banned in principle under the Food Sanitation Act. The only exception is for preventing potatoes from sprouting — adding nematode extermination as a new exception would require an advisory-committee review and a revision of the ministerial ordinance at the Health and Agriculture Ministries, and there's no sign of that happening
The day will come when a three-star restaurant proudly announces, 'And here we have potatoes from Furano'
Buyers will all start saying 'domestic potatoes are too expensive, we won't purchase them'
so isn't this just talking out of both sides of their mouth?
Well, they've got a lot more land
You can't really compare that to land that's never once had the pest get in
Couldn't they just keep importing them frozen like before?
The goal is to force purchases in volumes so huge that processing can't keep up
Probably won't change?
They currently import them pre-cut and ready to fry
Maybe they'll switch to importing them fresh and processing/frying them in Japan instead?
No way that happens
Even now it's 100% frozen from America,
with 20-ton trailers constantly shuttling loads to the processing plants
Japan can't build a processing facility on that scale
In reality they're just scared of losing on price competition
Well, that's probably true, but…
remember the Irish Potato Famine
pests and disease can wipe out crops in the worst case…
Don't you know about Ireland?
If the pests do get in, it's the Japanese public who'll bear the consequences
Well, the weak yen has been making everyone poorer…
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It's about time we started questioning that too. If Japanese agriculture isn't forced to compete, the gap with other countries will just keep growing
There are options, like making consumption tax 0% only for domestic crops, but then it becomes a nightmare if people fake the country of origin
Talk of self-sufficiency aside, the fertilizer and feed are imported from China, the U.S., and elsewhere anyway
so saying farming would become impossible because of pests is a nonsensical argument
how exactly is the bug supposed to travel all the way to a farm field?
are farmers going to dump the imported potatoes right in their fields or something?
Soil moves around
It can even travel on the wind
Come on, get it together
The same truck that hauls the American potatoes from the port might also make a stop at a Japanese farm afterward, no?
Also, are American growers even bothering to worry about pests when they grow these?
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The proposed lifting of the ban on fresh potato imports is part of ongoing Japan-U.S. negotiations over agricultural market access. Japan has historically refused to allow imports of fresh potatoes for plant-quarantine reasons — namely, to prevent pests and diseases from entering the country. At the same time, as pointed out in the thread, the vast majority of frozen and processed potatoes used for french fries are already sourced from the U.S., so it’s worth keeping in mind the different treatment historically given to fresh versus processed potatoes. It’s also a commonly misunderstood point that food irradiation is permitted under the Food Sanitation Act only as an exception for preventing potatoes from sprouting — applying it for the purpose of exterminating pests, as raised as a concern here, would require a separate process of revising the ministerial ordinance. Opinions in the thread split because complaints about soaring prices produced calls to ‘welcome the lifting of the ban,’ while at the same time there was concern that if nematode damage spreads, it would deal an ‘irreversible’ blow to domestic production — both of which remain speculation at a stage where the details of the briefing itself (the specifics of any prevention measures) have not yet been made public.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (News Express+) thread “‘It Will Be Irreversible’: Farmers Firmly Oppose Lifting Ban on Fresh U.S. Potato Imports as Agriculture Ministry Holds Briefing“.
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