Imported Foods Monitoring and Guidance Plan for FY 2024.

The purpose of the Plan is to promote the intensive, effective and efficient monitoring and guidance over imported foods, and thereby to further ensure the safety of imported foods.
The Plan specifies the contents of imported foods monitoring and inspection for FY 2024. The Monitoring Plan may be reviewed taking into consideration of import trends, inspection results, violation situations, survey results of food hygiene regulations of exporting countries, and information on occurrence of food-related health damages and recalls of unhygienic foods in exporting countries. Inspections will be conducted intensively on items with a high risk of health hazards, such as aflatoxins and pathogenic microbes. In addition, the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (MHLW) will ensure the steady implementation of inspections on agricultural chemical residues in accordance with the Positive List System, taking into account the regulations concerning agricultural chemicals in other countries, the status of their use, cases of detecting agricultural chemicals as well as violation cases of agricultural food products at the time of import. Positive List System for agricultural chemical residues means a system that prohibits, in principle, the sale, etc. of foods in which agricultural chemicals are contained in excess of the quantity specified as unlikely to cause harm to human health. Monitoring inspections should be conducted on a wide range of foods to ensure more effective implementation. Monitoring inspections for foods subject to inspection order concerning agricultural chemical residues are carried out in order to verify the reliability on the control of agricultural chemical residues in exporting countries. In order to assess the situations of the agricultural chemicals use in the exporting country, the MHLW carries out monitoring inspections at a higher frequency for certain imported foods and inspection items concerned to enable detection of a violation with a certain statistical confidence level. Other measures proposed in the Plan include: Emergency measures based on overseas information on food safety incidents; Promotion of hygiene control measures in exporting countries; Promotion of voluntary safety management by importers; Implementation of pre-import guidance; Preparation and retention of records of imported foods; Development and skill enhancement of human resources in charge of food safety; etc.