TOKYO — Despite continuing fears over the safety of food from the area of the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan has lifted a ban on beef shipments from there that it had imposed just a month ago, when meat contaminated with radioactive material was found to have reached Japanese supermarkets.

The decision to lift the ban underscores the difficulty faced by the government. Officials are eager to minimize the harm to farmers from the Fukushima area and to bring the local economy back to normal, but they are also trying to repair the damage to their credibility from the handling of the nuclear disaster, caused by an earthquake and tsunami in March.

The discovery of radioactive cesium in a number of products last month has greatly undermined public trust in the safety of produce from the region, even if, as the government says, the amount that was found was tiny.

“There is no safe level of internal radiation exposure, especially for children,” Tatsuhiko Kodama, head of the Radioisotope Center at Tokyo University, said in an interview this month.