While McDonald’s Japan is dealing with its worst crisis in more than a decade, rice from Fukushima would now appear to be safe, following the publication of the results of tests on the content of radioactive substances in rice cultivated in the province in Northeast Japan.
2015 began with good news for local farmers who, for the past three years, have had to deal with radioactive material leaked from the Daiichi nuclear plant that was seriously damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
According to the latest measurements published by the local administration, all of the rice harvested last year in the province in Northeast Japan falls within the safety parameters for radioactivity in food established by the government in April 2012.
The caesium content of rice in Fukushima is below the level of 100 becquerel (the unit of measurement that calculates the activity of a substance in which atoms, as they decay, produce energy in the form of radiation) per kilogram.
As has been the case for the last three years, the tests were conducted on over 10 million sacks of rice (around 360 thousand tonnes). The results are very encouraging for local farmers as now the rice can be put on the market.
This news has allayed concerns about the contaminating effects on the rice crop deriving from the clear up operation at the Daiichi plant.
Furthermore these test results are sure to encourage the recovery of the flow of “white gold” from Tohoku (Northeast in Japanese) to Japan’s Asian neighbours.
“We are heading in the right direction,” said Tsuneaki Oonami, director of the department that supervises the cultivation of rice in the province of Fukushima, in an interview with Reuters. According to reports in Asahi Shimbun, many farmers in the area, who along with those in the fishing sector were among the categories worst hit by the disaster almost four years ago, have been employing new cultivation methods using new fertilisers that help in reducing the absorption of caesium.
During the summer the Tokyo government had, in fact, signalled an end to the ban on exports, which came into force in 2011 following the nuclear accident.
Seoul in recent weeks sent their own experts to verify the situation in the agricultural areas considered critical due to their vicinity to the nuclear plant and South Korea could well be the first important market to reopen its doors to rice from Fukushima.
While the Tohoku farmers celebrate their victory, McDonald’s Japan’s long-running crisis shows little sign of abating. Things have not been going smoothly for the hamburger multinational that has had to deal with a continuous stream of “discoveries” of “alien” objects in the meals that they have been serving their customers.
The most recent case involved a client in Osaka who went to the press to report having found a human tooth (allegedly deep fried to perfection) in her French fries last summer. A few days earlier in Misawa, in the North of the main Island in the archipelago, another client had reported the discovery of a piece of vinyl in the chicken McNuggets and a similar discovery was reported in Koriyama near Fukushima.
McDonald’s had already announced a clampdown on its suppliers following the revelation last summer that rotten chicken meat had been used as an ingredient for the nuggets sold in McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and convenience store chains such as Family Mart.
The outcome is that the McDonald’s brand in Japan seems to have been compromised, in spite of special offers and attempts to win back lost clients. The figures speak for themselves: losses of 157 million dollars in 2014, the first loss recorded in over ten years of business.
Following the encouraging results of the radioactivity tests and the McDonald’s debacle, who is to say that Fukushima rice isn’t set to become Fukushima Rice ®? As Sarah Casanova, CEO of McDonald’s Japan, would say, “consumer trust in the brand comes before everything else.”
