Still Eating Pacific Fish?

Japan exported $76 million of food products to Canada in 2010, including $13 million of fish and crustaceans. No figures were available for 2011.

The Gazette analyzed the Japanese fisheries data for 22 seafood species that Japan has exported to Canada in recent years.

Some cesium was found in 16 of these 22 species in November, the last full month for which data was available.

Cesium was especially prevalent in certain of the species:

73 per cent of mackerel tested

91 per cent of the halibut

92 per cent of the sardines

93 per cent of the tuna and eel

94 per cent of the cod and anchovies

100 per cent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

Some of the fish were caught in Japanese coastal waters. Other catches were made hundreds of kilometres away in the open ocean.

There, the fish can also be caught by fishers from dozens of other nations that ply the waters of the Pacific.

Yet, Japan is the only country that appears to be systematically testing fish for radiation and publicly reporting the results.

CFIA is no longer doing any testing of its own. It did some radiation tests on food imports from areas of Japan around the stricken nuclear plant in the weeks after the Fukushima accident.

Only one of the 169 tested products showed any radiation. CFIA stopped doing the tests last June, saying they weren’t needed.