The leading Spanish canned seafood association is spearheading a new effort to promote E.U. safety standards to countries in Central and South America.
GIZ GmbH, a German society of International Cooperation within the Spanish Association of Manufacturers of Canned Fish and Shellfish (Anfaco-Cecopesca), is coordinating a new consortium of community organizations. The consortium will develop an international project for implementing training activities and technical assistance missions in countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. These activities are framed in "Better Training for Safer Food" (TSF), an initiative of the European Commission's Health and Consumers Directorate-General (DG Sanco).
This organization will be the technical leader in three of the seven priorities included in lot 2 about food safety and vegetable health assigned to them by the E.U.
Specifically, Anfaco-Cecopesca will be in charge of the fishery products programs, which will take place in Jamaica for the Caribbean countries. Similar efforts on pesticides will take place in Uruguay for Central American countries and on fishery products and bivalve mollusks in Peru for South American countries.
The budget amounts to almost EUR 1.6 million and will be developed over a period of three years.
Gonzalo Ojea, head of training and external cooperation department in Anfaco-Cecopesca explained to SeafoodSource the interest in these projects: "We are interested in cooperating with third countries with the aim that their fishery products could enter the E.U. without problems." He referred to the important consumption of fishery products in Spain and to the shortage of raw materials in Spain and the rest of the E.U., noting the need for third countries to continue to import without hurdles in order to make up for this lack.
Ojea explained the actions to develop this international project. "It has two actions clearly defined: the organization of regional workshops and technical assistance missions." The main part of the missions, he said, consist of visits to sanitary and fishery officials, companies, landing areas and other locations with the aim of seeing "in situ" the deficiencies, and to advise and help them as required.
Ojea observed that the main deficiencies between countries change a lot. However, "in general we see that Central American countries have more deficiencies than South American countries and other areas." He highlighted some of the more common deficiencies like lack of inspectors, control laboratories, training of technical experts and teams and organizations that advise them properly and who are fluent in the legal requirements for exporting to the E.U.
Regarding his general opinion about these countries, he said that "most of them are countries of vast fishing resources" but in many cases they don´t know it because they don't have scientific vessels to carry out fishing missions. Others are still in a developing stage and they can improve a lot, but for that they need funding and facilities to do so, said Ojea.
