The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has closed public comment on proposed regulations requiring some high-risk foods, including seafood, to be fully traceable throughout the supply chain.
The new rules, proposed last fall and structured under Section 204 of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), would establish additional traceability recordkeeping requirements for companies that process or hold foods listed on the FDA’s proposed food traceability list, which includes finfish (including smoked fish), crustaceans, and mollusks and bivalves. Ready-to-eat seafood salad manufacturers would also be subject to the additional requirements.
The rules would require full-chain traceability, tracking seafood from its point of origin to its final destination, requiring supplies to obtain and record information about the origins and exact identity of its products.
The rules “are intended to make it easier to rapidly and effectively track the movement of a food to prevent or mitigate a foodborne illness outbreak,” according to the FDA.
At least one marine environmental NGO, Oceana, supports the extension of the FSMA rules to seafood, arguing they will improve seafood’s food safety and help to combat illegal fishing by requiring that fish be tracked back to a legal source.
“Seafood traceability can also help stop seafood fraud, specifically species substitution where one fish is swapped out for another. This bait and switch can include selling a lower-value fish as a more expensive one, hiding an illegally-caught fish by giving it a legal identity, and even masking health concerns,” Oceana said on its website, where it encouraged supporters to comment in favor of the proposed rules. “In 2011, Oceana launched its seafood fraud campaign with the goal of ensuring that all seafood sold in the U.S. is safe, legally caught, and honestly labeled. Seafood fraud threatens consumer health and safety, cheats consumers when they pay higher prices for a mislabeled, lower-value product, and hides harmful practices like illegal fishing, poorly regulated aquaculture, and human rights abuses.”
Oceana urged the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to approve the new rules.
“The Biden-Harris administration has an opportunity to expand traceability requirements to all seafood,” it said. “This swift action would ensure that all seafood sold in the U.S. is safe, legally caught, and honestly labeled.”
In a 49-page document submitted on Monday, 22 February, the day the FDA closed its rules to public comment, the National Fisheries Institute, the largest trade group representing the U.S. seafood industry, pointed out a number of problems the inclusion of seafood on the traceability list would cause the industry.
The document, obtained by SeafoodSource, warned the additional requirements will be onerous, costly to seafood companies, and in some cases, are either redundant or unnecessary. The benefits of the extra work could, in some cases, be minimal, NFI said.
“We found that the proposed rule does not align with other federal traceability requirements in existence for certain seafood species, so it creates confusion within the seafood industry and unnecessary duplication of records,” NFI said.
Additionally, the rules may force compliance among some international seafood firms subjecting them to U.S. regulations even in cases when the seafood they are trading never enters the United States, NFI said. They also may require companies to disclose trade secrets regarding their supply chains, the trade group argued.
In its comments, the NFI ask for exemptions from the new rules for various seafood products, including low-acid and acidified canned seafood products; pasteurized crabmeat; surimi; molluscan shellfish regulated under the National Shellfish Sanitation Prog; and seafood species that are rarely consumed raw.
Referencing a section of the rules requiring the FDA to “ensure that the public health benefits of imposing additional recordkeeping requirements outweigh the cost of compliance with such requirements,” NFI countered by saying the new rules’ costs “badly outweigh the benefits.”
“NFI’s members fully support the need for enhanced traceability recordkeeping to benefit public health when warranted – there is no argument,” NFI said. “We do question the need to trace back to the harvest or farm for the vast majority of the seafood species consumed in the United States. Just because that need is important for other regulations and programs, that does not mean that FDA has to require the same.
Photo courtesy of Baloncici/Shutterstock
