The Japanese fish war between China and the United States
With the start of the waste water spill from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, China has banned Japanese fish, while continuing to fish in the same sea… For the United States it is economic coercion and here's how it plans to help the economy Japanese
Since Japan got the green light from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the end of August to discharge waste water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, China no longer buys its fish and so the United States intervened, who have signed "a long-term contract" with Tokyo.
THE FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR INCIDENT AND THE CHINA BAN
On March 11, 2011, a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake flooded three reactors of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, causing a level 7 nuclear accident, the same attributed to the Chernobyl accident in 1986. The water used to cool the reactors , and therefore highly radioactive, was then stored in hundreds of sealed steel tanks while waiting for a decision on how to dispose of it.
But in 2019, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the plant's operator, warned that it would run out of storage space for the contaminated water within three years, and in 2021 the Japanese government released a plan on the gradual discharge of such material into the sea after chemically treating it.
Last May, the Japanese nuclear regulator formally approved the discharge plan and the IAEA, after years of study, declared it safe on July 4. Japan then began releasing wastewater from the Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean on August 24.
At this point, citing food safety concerns but continuing to fish near Japan, China immediately banned fish exports from the neighboring country despite calls from G7 trade ministers to repeal those measures.
BUT WHAT DOES SUCH A NOTICE MEAN FOR JAPAN?
However, Beijing's decision represents a serious blow to the Japanese economy. To give you an idea, Quartz reports some data on Japan's fish exports to China before the water spill operation began.
The northern Japanese island of Hokkaido alone, known for its scallop farming, exported 64 percent of its seafood to China, where it was also processed for sale in the United States, Europe and even Japan.
“Now – writes Quartz – scallops and other seafood are piled up in the freezers of Japanese processing plants” and “the more than a thousand affected fishermen must not only recover from the damage to physical sales, but also from the lasting damage to their reputations”.
Meanwhile, the price drop for Japanese scallops in the two months following the Chinese ban was between 11 and 27 percent.
THE TIMID HELP FROM THE UNITED STATES
The United States then intervened last October 30th , whose army began purchasing Japanese fish products but the figures are light years away from those of China. In fact, while Beijing imported 100,000 tons of scallops last year, the US military only bought one ton to start.
The agreement, a “long-term contract,” between the two countries calls for the U.S. military to purchase Japanese seafood in bulk – for the first time – for soldiers in mess halls and aboard ships and to sell in stores and in base restaurants, Rahm Emanuel, US ambassador to Japan, told Reuters .
AN AGREEMENT DESTINED TO LEAVE THE TIME IT FINDS
Emanuel then wanted to highlight that the United States' move is aimed at "wearing down China's economic coercion", defined as China's "most persistent and pernicious tool". But, as Quartz notes, considering that the total release of all wastewater from Fukushima could take up to 40 years, it is indeed credible and sustainable for China to maintain such a ban for the next 40 years and for the United States to take charge of such a promise?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/la-guerra-del-pesce-giapponese-tra-cina-e-stati-uniti/ on Sun, 05 Nov 2023 06:50:34 +0000.