Hong Kong’s seafood businesses brace for sales slump as Japan plans to discharge radioactive water

AS TOKYO plans to discharge treated radioactive wastewater into the sea, Japanese restaurant operator Sam Lam is busy finding substitutes for Japanese seafood that could soon be banned from entering Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong government said last Wednesday that the city would immediately bar the import of aquatic products from 10 Japanese prefectures if wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant is released into the Pacific Ocean.

Lam said his team could get seafood from other sources and change menus to adjust to the ban, but he predicted that revenues could nevertheless drop from 10 percent to 20 percent if the Japanese and Hong Kong governments press ahead with their plans.

“My customers told me that once the water is discharged, they will eat fewer (aquatic products) or stop eating them,” he said in an interview Friday.

Lam is not alone among Japanese restaurants and seafood suppliers in Hong Kong who are bracing for a slump in business under the potential ban, and who fear that the discharge could lead to a general decline of confidence in the safety of seafood.

The financial hub was Japan’s second biggest market for fishery exports after mainland China and purchased 75.5 billion yen ($546 million) worth of aquatic products from the country last year, the Japanese government’s data showed.

The 10 affected prefectures — Tokyo, Fukushima, Chiba, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Gunma, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano and Saitama — provide about 15 percent of the total amount of imported aquatic products from Japan, according to estimates by Simon Wong, president of the Hong Kong Federation of Restaurants and Related Trade.

Wong said the city’s Japanese restaurants could find substitute seafood products from other regions, but they may not share the same level of prestige, and that could mar a restaurant’s image or make customers feel that the food is less authentic. (AP)