Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is continuing its search for food products that have been illegally imported from Japan.
Food products from five Japanese prefectures have been banned in Taiwan since 2011, at a time when the Fukushima nuclear disaster was still unfolding. However, a number of products from these areas have recently turned up in Taiwanese supermarkets with falsified place of origin labels.
The FDA has begun using factory codes on Japanese food products to trace their origins. Through this process, the FDA has determined that more than 40 products originally scheduled for recall are actually from areas of Japan not covered under the ban.
However, Taipei City’s health department has announced that it has found another falsely labeled product from inside the ban area, and the search for more illegal products continues.
FDA official Wang Te-yuan said Thursday that his agency has come up with a list of 13 companies that are suspected of importing the illegal food products. The companies could be subject to fines of between NT$30,000-NT$3 million (roughly US$1,000-US$100,000).
Wang said that companies claiming innocence will have to ask the original manufacturers to submit proof of their locations. He said that Taiwan’s representative office in Japan will then work to determine the truth of the situation.
Wang also responded to criticism of the FDA’s failure to check factory codes until now, four years after the ban first went into effect. He said that Taiwan had requested information about factory codes from Japan’s representative office in Taipei, but received no response. He said that Taiwanese authorities have only clarified the situation after consulting official Japanese documents.