Americans are eating an estimated 420 to 550 million pounds of mislabeled seafood annually – and the mislabeling is having an impact on marine ecosystems, according to a new paper.
The paper from Advanced Conservation Strategies (ACS) published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that “mislabeled apparent consumption” amounts to around a pound of mislabeled seafood for every American.
After analyzing 141 mislabeling studies, the authors found that popular seafood items such as shrimp, salmon, and crab are among the most frequently mislabeled products.
“We also found that substitution of giant tiger prawn for whiteleg shrimp is responsible for more mislabeled apparent consumption than any other product, driven by the fact that Americans eat more of it than any other seafood product,” ASC Founder Josh Donlan and Kailin Kroetz, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, wrote in the paper.
Donlan told SeafoodSource that the paper does not conclude whether the mislabeling is intentional fraud or is unintentional, “due to the complexities of the supply chain.”
“Exploring where in the supply chain the mislabeling is occurring and the motivations for intentional fraudulent mislabeling is something that we think is an important area to explore more in the future,” he said.
Substitute products are more likely to be imported than the product listed on the label. However, a substitute product is most likely to originate from the U.S. compared to any other single country, ACS said.
“This is concerning because the United States has relatively strict fisheries management and relatively healthy marine populations compared to many other fisheries worldwide,” Donlan said.
Around 60 percent of U.S. mislabeled seafood involves only products that are wild-caught, the authors found.
“For those products, the substituted products come from fisheries with less healthy stocks and greater impacts on bycatch species compared to the product on the label,” ACS said. “Similarly, substituted products are from fisheries with less-effective management and with management policies less likely to address impacts of fishing on habitats and ecosystems.”
The authors cautioned that more research is needed, and their findings should be viewed through a lens of uncertainty.
“This is partially because fisheries, trade, and mislabeling data are often scarce and challenging to work with because of the ways they are recorded and reported,” ACS said.
Photos courtesy of Josh Donlan and Kailin Kroetz
