Hong Kong will ban food imports from 10 Japanese prefectures if the nation’s government proceeds with a plan to dump nuclear waste water into the sea, the city’s Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan has said.
Speaking at the Legislative Council on Wednesday, Tse said the Hong Kong government would immediately ban food imports from Tokyo, Fukushima, Chiba, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, and Saitama prefectures if the 1.33 million cubic metres of groundwater, rainwater and water used for cooling at the Fukushima site are released.
Citing a precautionary principle in environmental law, which states that it is better to control activities that may have environmentally harmful consequences than to wait for incontrovertible scientific evidence, Tse said all seafood imports that are frozen, chilled, dried or stored in any other way will have to be banned, along with both processed and unprocessed seaweed products and sea salt.
