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INTERVIEW Radioactive contamination scare threatens fishing industry
Korea Coastal Fishermen's Association President Kim Dae-sung at a port in Namhae County, South Gyeongsang Province, in July / Courtesy of Kim Dae-sung
By Ko Dong-hwan
Fishermen association chief dismisses concerns about seafood contamination
By Ko Dong-hwan
YEOSU, South Jeolla Province ― Fish, shellfish and other marine species in Korean waters cannot be contaminated by the discharge of radioactive water from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that is likely to begin later this year, the leader of Korea's fishermen's association said.
The 70-year-old from the country's southern county of Namhae was concerned that the unproven contamination rumors have dramatically cut domestic sales of seafood, pushing many households in the fishery industry to the brink.
Kim Dae-sung, who represents the Korea Coastal Fishermen's Association based in Taean County, South Chungcheong Province, said that even if the controversial radioactive water is released, marine species in Korean waters cannot be contaminated by it because of the direction of ocean currents. He used the Kuroshio Current as an example.
“It's a natural order,” Kim, who has been in the fishery business for 45 years, told The Korea Times, referring to the world's second-biggest current that flows northward and is part of the greater North Pacific gyre that flows clockwise.
“The current flows alongside Japan and joins the Pacific, reaches the United States and dissipates on its way back to Hawaii. There is no way any radioactive Japanese fish can reach Korean waters unless that current flows backward.”
Kim said that since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 2011, in which large amounts of water contaminated with radioactive isotopes were discharged from the reactors into the Pacific, not one contaminated fish from Japanese waters has been found in Korea. He added that whenever he visited Fukuoka in western Japan, he saw trash floating in nearby waters that had apparently drifted over from Korea, whereas he never saw Japanese trash arriving in Korean waters.
He said those instances prove two things: fish in Japanese waters cannot reach Korean waters by themselves due to the unchanging ocean current and seafood imports from Japan have been controlled by the Korean government stringently enough to sort out anything with a trace of contamination.
Im Jeong-hoon from the country's large fishing trawlers federation explains how ocean currents flow and how the radioactive water discharged from Japan cannot reach Korean waters during a rally in front of Busan Station, July 10. Newsis
“Some claim that contaminated Japanese marine life would reach Korean waters as fast as 74 days from the disaster's breakout,” Kim said. “But no contaminated fish or anything was found along Korea's east coast that's closest to Japan after the period. And the contamination didn't spread throughout the country after four to five years, either.”
Kim was angered by those who circulated controversial rumors that have gained traction with protesters ― pointing his finger mostly at politicians from the country's opposition parties and environmentalists who did not provide any scientific evidence.
He said rumors that have scared away customers from fish markets and seafood restaurants, causing an economic setback for the local fishery industry starting about seven months ago. Hit particularly hard were restaurants ― a major source of revenue for small coastal towns that depend on tourism ― that are mostly run by fishermen's wives.
“These days are harder than when the COVID-19 pandemic struck the country,” Kim said. “Tourists visiting coastal regions as well as customers to the restaurants have plummeted.”
Low demand for seafood has slashed down their value including those caught in Korean waters ― crab, halibut and rockfish in western waters, croaker and butterfish in the south, and squid, flatfish and octopus in the east, according to Yoo Byeong-seo, secretary-general of the association. He said a flatfish used to be worth 10,000 won ($8.00) per kilogram but has now plummeted to 3,000 won.
“Revenue per fishing vessel has been slashed by more than 40 percent since the rumors surfaced, while restaurants lost more than 50 percent of their usual volume of customers,” Yoo told The Korea Times.
“Many households support themselves by engaging in the fishery business together, with husbands out in the ocean and their wives selling sashimi and seafood in the restaurants. When the rumors held people back from visiting the oceanic tourism sites, the economic impact hit those households hard.”
Minister of Food and Drug Safety Oh Yu-kyoung, front right, checks scallops imported from Japan which are stored inside the Busan Gamcheon Port Seafood Market, May 25. Newsis
On July 10, Kim organized a gathering of members of his association in front of Busan Station. Some 2,000 fishermen from across the country, including those from hundreds of kilometers up north in Gangwon Province and Gyeonggi Province, gathered to raise awareness of local seafood, which they insisted is clean of radioactivity, and called on rumormongers to stop scaring people by saying the discharge will contaminate local seafood. The rally participants represented the association's 15,000 members with 45,000 fishing vessels.
“Among those who couldn't make it to Busan, many gave up fishing that day because they wanted to express that they were in this campaign together,” said Kim, who started leading the fishermen's group in 2021. “We fishermen have no other ways to express our voices than by holding such a rally.”
A week after the gathering, representatives of the country's 2,000 scientists from the Korean Federation of Fisheries Science and Technology Societies Safety met in Seoul and checked their unified concerns that the rumors' “social framing” is overshadowing scientific facts and that public trust in local seafood should be repaired to protect the country's 1.5 million people involved in the fishery industry.
Lee Byeong-hoon, president of the Korean Society of Food Hygiene and Safety, admitted in the meeting at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry that the country's academic circles have been aloof to “risk communication” with the public regarding the discharge.
Minister of Food and Drug Safety Oh Yu-kyoung invested part of Tuesday in risk communication via YouTube. She said online that the country will continue banning imports of Japanese food products from eight prefectures near Fukushima ― a measure Korea began shortly after the disaster ― regardless of the discharge.
Korea's maximum radioactivity standard is 100 becquerel (Bq) per kilogram, 10 times stricter than the international standard of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization called the Codex Alimentarius. If any Japanese seafood imports are discovered with radioactivity as little as 0.5 Bq, Korea will virtually stop importing it, according to the minister.