Pangasius, tilapia farms certified

GlobalGAP at the European Seafood Exposition on Wednesday held a press conference to announce progress that has been made in the assurance of responsibly produced tilapia and pangasius certified against its aquaculture standards.

The NGO announced three companies have received tilipia certification and two have received pangasius certification.

HQ Sustainable, Aquamar and Trapia have met GlobalGAP’s standards for tilpia and Binca Seafoods and Anova for pangasius.

Peter Niedermeier, managing director of Binca discussed the challenges of implementing the standards.

“Manpower is the most important factor,” said Binca managing director. “We need to convince the people and make them understand why this is important. We come with the standards and the farmer says ‘fine, but what should I do?’ and their second question is if they invest, what will they get. We need to change the minds of people and cannot do it within one week, it takes months even years for people to get used to records and traceability. That’s more difficult then implementing the standards.”

Tropical Aquaculture, which markets Aquanor’s products, discussed the benefits of obtaining the business-to-business certification, stating that the comprehensive and cost effective analysis validates what they believe is important to their group and customers in terms of moving forward.

“It further adds to our support and confidence provided to us,” said John Schramm, Tropical’s president.

GlobalGAP and WWF also provided an update on their partnership in working towards the establishment of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.

“GlobalGAP and the WWF are working together to address an important and immediate need in the aquaculture industry: training auditors how to assess farms that adopt the final tilapia aquaculture dialogue standards and teaching farmers what they need to do to adopt the pangasius aquaculture dialogue standards when those are completed in a few months,” said Jose Villalon, managing director of the WWF U.S. aquaculture program.

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