Japanese Disaster Impacts Asian Food Supplies

A story attracting attention in Asia is the impact of the Japanese seismic and nuclear disasters on the region's food supply.

I first noted the story tonight on BBC Asia, which provides the BBC programming available in my area of North America during the evening here. The news segment interviewed Hong Kong residents who were stocking up on a favored Japanese baby formula. They were concerned that future supplies of the formula would be tainted with radiation emitted from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors.

I couldn't find a link to this very interesting story on the BBC's website. I went to Hong Kong Yahoo, where I found a link from the English-language South China Morning Post. While far from ideal, the story does discuss the current Hong Kong rush to purchase the preferred Japanese formula. (A seemingly better story from the same newspaper was trimmed to two paragraphs, along with a subscription invitation.)

The heart of the story is both fascinating and ominous. Hong Kong, mainland Chinese and other Asian consumers became committed purchasers of Japanese and American baby formula after the 2008 melamine scandal in China. If you don't recall this story, the episode involved large scale tainting of milk powder manufactured in the People's Republic of China. Around 300,000 children became ill; officials attributed six deaths to the fatal powder. The incident was a profound black eye to the PRC leadership and aroused multinational firms' mistrust of Chinese health standards. It also led to a profound suspicion among Chinese toward its homegrown baby formula products. Hence, strong demand quickly emerged for suitable baby formula from, ironically, the two countries Chinese nationalists least love: Japan and the United States.

The South China Morning Post story asserts that Hong Kong imports a considerable amount of food from Japan, apart from baby formula. Other regions of Asia, according to the BBC segment I watched this evening, are also key Japanese food export markets. A Thai health official noted her department was doing "before" and "after" samples of various Japanese foods, with the intention of blocking any item exhibiting unusual radiation levels.

The potential embargo on certain Japanese food items comes at a time of global price inflation and greater demands from an emerging regional (especially Chinese) middle class for better quality food. That demand is especially strong for foods high in protein. The Japanese export a lot of seafood and marine products, such as seaweed. Complicating matters is that shattered areas of northern Japan produced some of the food products to satisfy both domestic desires and foreign demand. Those products may develop a shadow of corrosive doubt over their quality, thanks to concerns over radioactivity.

The food story doesn't provide the screaming headlines a fire at a nuclear facility generates. However, a compromised food supply has a quiet impact. Its cumulative potency is similar to a series of undersea tremors that build up to produce a sudden, lethal tsunami.

The image shows a container of Japanese manufactured Meiji Hohoemi milk powder.