Comment: Look at the following statement, perception is everything: "Concern that radioactive emissions from the Fukushima Dai- Ichi facility will contaminate food and cause cancer are prohibiting hundreds of dairy farmers like Kurosawa from selling their milk." Uranium mining and milling will ruin our cow's milk in Virginia plus the blasting will cause them to be spook, milk will go down plus make them sick! So no to uranium mining and milling in Virginia!
March 22, 2011, 1:56 AM EDT
March 22 (Bloomberg) -- Kanju Kurosawa kept his 50 dairy cows alive by carting water from a neighboring town after local supplies were knocked out by the March 11 earthquake.
By the time taps flowed again on March 19, Kurosawa and his 80-year-old father had trucked 12,000 liters (3,100 gallons) for the herd -- less than half its requirement.
Milk output is at half the pre-quake levels, he said, and what’s produced is considered unfit for human consumption because of the dairy’s proximity to the Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s stricken nuclear power plant, 52 kilometers (32 miles) away.
Concern that radioactive emissions from the Fukushima Dai- Ichi facility will contaminate food and cause cancer are prohibiting hundreds of dairy farmers like Kurosawa from selling their milk.
With no compensation, Kurosawa, 53, said he doesn’t know how long he can continue the 70-year-old family business.
“We don’t know how dairy farmers in Fukushima will survive,” said Kurosawa, who estimates he’s losing 60,000 yen to 70,000 yen ($740-$865) a day on his farm in Iino, 235 kilometers north of Tokyo. “I want to stick it out, but I don’t know how long the radiation impact will last and whether the spring grass will be contaminated. I can’t continue if I have to buy all my feed.”
Radiation Contamination
Fukushima supplied about 1.3 percent of Japan’s 2009 annual milk production of about 7.91 million tons, according to government statistics. Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked local officials to suspend milk shipments from the region’s 567 dairy farms after random tests found levels of radiation that exceeded government-prescribed safe levels.
Milk shouldn’t be consumed from the local area until tests for radioactive iodine have been completed, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Farmers in Fukushima have been told to keep their animals in barns and not to feed them fodder kept outside.
More than half of Kurosawa’s produce would be used in local schools and supermarkets, with the remainder sold to either Meiji Holdings Co. or Morinaga Milk Industry Co.
Milk shipments from Fukushima will likely remain suspended at least until the crisis was the nuclear plant is resolved, said Mitsuhiro Honda at the milk and dairy products division of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.
“Some of the farmers may abandon the business and destroy their cows, too, as they don’t know how long the shipment restrictions will continue,” said Saori Kabeya, an official with Fukushima prefecture’s livestock department.
The affected farmers will be compensated, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters in Tokyo yesterday.
“Fundamentally, the primary responsibility is on Tokyo Electric as it stems from the nuclear disaster,” Edano said. “If it can’t compensate fully, the central government will guarantee them.”
Kurosawa’s last milk delivery was March 12. He had to borrow a neighbor’s generator to power dairy machinery after electricity supply was interrupted by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake. His cows remain stressed by the temblor and aftershocks, he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kanoko Matsuyama in Singapore at kmatsuyama2@bloomberg.net
; Aya Takada in Tokyo at atakada2@bloomberg.net; To contact the reporters on this story Jae Hur in Tokyo at jhur1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Jason Gale at j.gale@bloomberg.net
Read more:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-22/dumped-milk-thinning-cows-signal-new-threat-on-fukushima-farms.html
