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Japan’s green tea industry hit with radiation crisis

VIDEO Crisis brewing as Japan’s tea farmers face radiation ban June 19, 2011CNN) — Japan’s green tea fields sway in the early summer winds, the picture of bucolic beauty. But beneath these peaceful rows of young green buds, ready for the second harvest of the year, a national crisis is brewing.Earlier this month, Japan’s government banned green tea from parts of three prefectures: Tochigi, Chiba and Kanagawa; and banned tea from all of a fourth prefecture, Ibaraki.The authorities had detected levels of radioactive cesium in tea leaves above the legal limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram.Now the discovery of radiation in fields further south in Shizuoka, Japan, some 400 kilometers away from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, threatens the most robust tea-producing region in Japan.The Shizuoka government says it asked five tea manufacturing plants in the Warashina district of Shizuoka to voluntarily stop shipping green tea leaves, after tests revealed dried tea contained 581 to 654 becquerels of cesium per kilogram…Crisis brewing as Japan’s tea farmers face radiation ban – CNN.com

June 20, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - Fukushima 2011