Here’s a recap of this week’s can’t-miss SeafoodSource news stories and commentaries:
• Seafood imports are “toxic” — that’s what Americans were left thinking after watching a segment “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” aired on Wednesday. Ron Sparks, Alabama’s agriculture commissioner, told an NBC reporter that seafood imports are “absolutely” a public health threat because they contain trace amounts of banned substances like chloramphenicol. The National Fisheries Institute immediately shot back, calling the segment one-sided and poorly reported. But what’s really at issue here is protectionism, not food safety, and the mainstream media is along for the ride, as I write in my commentary “Sensationalism sells.”
• In Scotland, politician Struan Stevenson is also taking shots at seafood imports, calling the Mekong River where pangasius is raised is “filthy.” But, like NFI, frozen seafood giant Findus Group and the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) are fighting back. Findus called pangasius, which it sells, a “safe, high quality product produced in compliance with internationally recognized standards,” while VASEP emphasized in a letter to Stevenson that Vietnam’s pangasius farms and processing plants are held to “very strict global standards.”
• Politics aside, Vietnam’s pangasius industry has another problem — a looming supply shortage that’s already affecting the European market. As SeafoodSource Contributing Editor Mike Urch writes in his commentary “Europe face pangasius shortage,” Vietnamese processors are receiving such low prices for pangasius from European buyers that they’re stockpiling the fish, and companies such as Bianfishco are reportedly holding upward of 10,000 metric tons of product, waiting to see what happens to a U.S. measure that would transfer responsibility of inspecting pangasius from the Food and Drug Administration to the Department of Agriculture.
• Is it time for aquaculture to establish its own voice? SeafoodSource Contributing Editor Jason Holland thinks so, as he writes in his commentary “Time for aquaculture to speak up.” Holland shares his thoughts on aquaculture’s future after attending a conference in London and listening to Peter Hajipieris, chief technical, sustainability and external affairs officer for frozen seafood giant Birds Eye Iglo, talk about the advantages of farmed seafood compared to wild.
• The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna is on the hot seat again, as it meets in Paris for 10 days to set bluefin tuna quotas for 2011. Already, the European Council has rejected the European Commission’s proposal to slash quotas for the species, as the divide between non-bluefin tuna fishing states and fishing states like Spain and France grows.
