At a meeting of the Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health, on 23 March, the member states’ experts endorsed a European Commission proposal to align the maximum levels of caesium-134 and caesium-137 with the new Japanese maximum levels, which will apply from 1 April. “Applying the same maximum levels in the EU and Japan will continue to provide consistency between the pre-export controls performed by the Japanese authorities and the controls on the level of radionuclides performed on feed and food originating from Japan at the point of entry into the EU,” explained the Commission. Measures on reinforced controls that were originally adopted on 24 March 2011 relative to imports of food and feed coming from certain regions (the 11 prefectures near the Fukushima nuclear plant) will also continue to apply, until 31 October 2012, and will continue to be regularly reviewed. Sake, whiskey and shochu will be excluded from the scope of these new measures, since the tests that were carried out by the Japanese authorities detected no radioactivity.