The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (MAFF) plans to accelerate intergovernmental talks on quarantine, necessary conditions for increasing exports of agricultural products to foreign countries.
With a view to facilitating exports particularly of fruits produced in Japan, MAFF takes steps to make preparations for the intergovernmental discussions by implementing demonstrative researches on effective quarantine measures in advance.
Proposal on quarantine based on successful results of these demonstrations, MAFF expects, will be useful to shorten the duration of intergovernmental talks on quarantine conditions from a current average of nine years to six years.
According to MAFF officials, lots of Japanese fruit producers do not like to have their products for exports fumigated with gaseous pesticides because they want to increase the exports by keeping high quality of their fruits.
However, it takes so many years to get an agreement with export counterparts on the quarantine measures other than fumigation even by demonstrating effective measures of non-fumigation with accumulated data of experimentations.
In fiscal 2017, MAFF will start a project with a budget of 91 million yen to promote studies on acceleration of the intergovernmental discussions on quarantine.
MAFF’s new project aims at showing effectiveness of non-fumigation quarantine by combining various measures such as installation of pheromone traps at fruit orchards, x-ray inspection systems at fruit grading houses, and low-temperature transportation instead of fumigation.