Growers attempting to 'decontaminate' fruit trees in Fukushima

As others correctly point out, strip the bark destroys the connective tissue of the trees, ie its circulatory system, what on earth are these imbeciles thinking.

JUST STOP FARMING FOR CHRISTS SAKE! Dont harvest fruit, dont eat said fruit, simple, now IMPLEMENT!

Better thing to do is to move, very, very far away.

@rumblebelly - sad to say but that is exactly what they should do - abandon the contaminated bits.

What will they try next? Rename the prefecture so as to avoid the stigma of the name Fukushima? Or mark all produce "Definitely NOT from Fukushima!"?

Sometimes I think they do this silly stuff because they don't want to be like the Russians who just threw their hands up in the air and abandoned the area around Chernobyl.

I wish I could be as optomistic as SillyGirl but I really doubt that all of the food, fish etc..from Fukushima will stay LABELED as from FUKUSHIMA. Put Kumamoto, Hokkaido etc..and we the people will just buy it up right??

none of that food will find itself on my table.

Basic botany lesson.......... " stripping their bark "means killing the trees.

Actually this reminds me of the famous scene from Alice in Wonderland.

She comes across the Queen's gardeners painting the white roses red.

No worries on the fruit; its bark is worse than its bite.

Bark on a tree has the same function as skin on a human.......

I'm going to wash that radiation out of my peach, started with Homer Simpson now it's all Southpark pressure blasting the bark off? Exposing the really absorbent parts to the continuing radioactive vomit...as Zichi said TEPCO has no responsibility once it leaves the rubble, they think. These farmers think once they sell it it's not their responsibility either. No responsibility...make a great national anthem? Maybe Gee could perform it.

Then perhaps they will chop the trees down and bring them to Tokyo for burning. Japan's finest minds at work.

Tepco should be doing this!!!!$$$$!!!

decontamination experiment=discard and burn

i'll decontaminate them with a chainsaw and a bulldozer!

You can only sweep things under the rug in so many ways.

@tokyokawasaki: They will relabel it.

Why are they doing this? Do they think people will eat what they produce?

Nice idea, and I do feel for the Fukushima farmers, but what is the point if no one is going to buy your glowing fruit???

Have they been doing this regularly for eight months? Or is this sudden inspiration, I wonder?

Those trees must all be shivering in their nakedness, though.

Hope the co-op has found some nice warm material to wrap them up in.

From the tree to the soil.......and into the tree.

Great for the water table.

Japanese science hard at work! Take high pressure water and blow the bark off the trees.

Now the radioactive particles are spread across the ground around the trees. They will be mixed with the soil. The tree roots will then absorb the radiation and then it's back to square one!

The "A" in JA does NOT stand for Agriculture!

Who knew?! If only we'd known that a quick hosing down could stop radiation from being harmful then all those people in Chernobyl could have been saved! I hope the government is strongly telling them that this will do virtually nothing to stop radiation

I applaud their will to try any experiment, but , without the clearance from the experts at Nuclear Energy commission I wouldn't believe anything from the JA. Now, in England where 10,000 farms where affected after Chernobyl in 1986 , there are still restrictions on farms in Whales and in Cumbria. Only now have the Food Standards Agency(FSA)said that recent tests on those remaining farms, show that the risk from radioactivity is now very low. I cannot comment on the rest of Europe. This is still an issue in Europe after 25 years, so expecting uncontaminated fruit after 12 months is maybe a little bit ambitious on JA's agenda.

Yeah that'll work really well!!!!!

Once again the unintelligence of this country truly amazes me. So the trees have radioactive material sticking to the bark and fruit that by their own admission is easily absorbed. So they think washing the bark and skin will fix the issue, a few problems with this theory: There is still radiation leaking, the radiation would already be absorbed into the tree itself, and if the tree is contaminated wouldnt the ground around the tree also be contaminated. When will these clowns give up on trying to fix what is unfixable as noone in their right mind would buy fruit or food from this area.