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Food Safety Crisis in Japan
Spurs Organic Food

FEATURE - Japan scandals rich pickings for organic exporters
JAPAN: April 4, 2002
TOKYO - Ugly vegetables at twice the price.

Organic food has long had a bad rap in Japan, where polished apples
and flawless melons wrapped in ribbons adorn supermarket shelves.

Such perfect bounty, grown with agrichemicals and pesticides, is
notoriously pricey. If an exquisite cantaloupe costs $20, why pay even more for
the gnarly organic version?

Until recently, few did.

But thanks to a string of health scares and mislabelling scandals
that have gnawed away at confidence in "conventional" produce, the world's
most finicky food market is getting back to basics.

Sniffing big opportunities in Japan's long-cosseted agricultural
sector, foreign exporters in particular are finding it pays to ditch the
chemicals.

"Organic vegetables aren't at all popular at home," said Thai farmer
Sermpong Taptipakorn, who grows spinach, onions, edible burdoch and Japanese
radishes in the rolling hills near Thailand's northern city of Chiangmai.

"But demand in Japan looks set to take off, so I switched my fields
over."

Taptipakorn was attending an international food fair held near Tokyo
recently to seek out distributors, hoping to get his thumb in an organic pie
worth $4-5 billion in 2001.

That is less than one percent of Japan's entire food sector, but it
represents a four-fold jump from half a decade ago.

"The Japanese are very quality-conscious compared to people in the
States, Europe or Australia," said Bruno de Britto, export sales manager of
U.S.-based Noon International, which ships frozen organic food.

"With all the recent scandals, we're starting to see stronger demand
and we're hoping to see it grow in the next five years."

SCARES AND SCANDALS

An outbreak of mad cow disease in September gutted Japan's appetite
for beef and sent shockwaves through the entire food sector.

The government came under fire for its handling of the crisis, and
for ignoring a warning last June from the European Union about a possible
outbreak of the brain-wasting disease, which has been linked in humans to variant
Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease (vCJD). In Europe, vCJD has killed about 100 people.

Mad cow is just one of a slew of confidence-shattering revelations
that organic advocates reel off.

In 2000, traces of banned StarLink biotech corn were discovered in
domestic food and animal feed made from imported U.S. grain, prompting Japan
to slash U.S. corn purchases.

In the same year, a massive outbreak of food poisoning due to
insanitary practices at the nation's top dairy producer left more than 10,000
people ill.

Earlier this year, Japan's sixth-largest meat packer admitted to
falsely labelling imported beef as domestic to get its hands on government
money aimed at helping the local industry to cope with mad cow disease.

Other firms have since been caught in similar scams, undermining
faith in the entire food-labelling system.

"In the past, people trusted major Japanese companies," said Akira
Hanawa, president of the Japan office of Genetic ID, a firm that tests for
genetically modified organisms in food.

"Now they feel big companies are only chasing profits."

BRAND APPEAL

Since September, organic supermarkets and restaurants have sprouted
up across the country, while ordinary shops have started stocking organic
produce alongside cheaper conventional vegetables, many imported from China.

Foreign exporters, for their part, have rushed to get their produce
certified under the Japan Agricultural Standard law.

That law, which came into force last April, says land must be free
of artificial fertilisers and chemicals for a minimum of three years
before produce can be designated organic.

"This is very big chance for us," said Atsuo Fuji, a certification
manager at Japan Organic and Natural Foods Association, which verifies that
food produced at home or abroad is what it claims to be.

"I'm hoping organic will become a kind of brand."

In a country where a decade of stop-and-start recession has done
little to erode sales of expensive designer goods, such branding could prove
critical.

If you want Japanese consumers to go bananas over organic bananas,
exporters say, the trick is to market them as the Louis Vuitton of the
vegetable world.

"In Europe and the U.S., you're really catering to people's health
needs," said Juan Campos, representative director of Daabon Organic Japan Co Ltd,
which ships organic coffee, chocolate and fruit from Colombia.

"In Japan, the way to sell organic is to sell it as high-quality
products. You really have to say, this is the sweetest banana you'll ever eat."

Daabon ships about half of the 840 tonnes of organic green coffee
that Japan imports yearly, a figure Campos expects to swell to 1,680 tonnes in
2002.

"It's an ideal market," he said. "It's big and it's growing. It's
allowing us to position ourselves at a very early stage when there's not much
competition."

Story by Tim Large
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE