The Washington, D.C.-based environmental NGO Oceana on Tuesday announced that it’s launching a campaign to raise awareness of seafood fraud in the United States. Seafood fraud comes in many forms, but three most common methods are species substitution, short-weighting and country-of-origin mislabeling.
During a press briefing on Wednesday, Oceana called on the federal government to make combating seafood fraud a priority. It said existing laws need to be enforced, inspections need to be increased, and coordination and information sharing among agencies need to improved, among other recommendations.
The organization also released a report titled “Bait and Switch: How seafood fraud hurts our oceans, our wallets and our health.” The report outlines how common seafood fraud is, providing a list of commonly mislabeled species, economic incentives for seafood fraud, environmental risks associated with illegal fishing and technologies that exist for traceability.
“Anonymity through processing is one of the reasons why seafood fraud is so widespread on the U.S. market since most fish are processed before being imported,” said Oceana in the report. “In the U.S., the consumer price index for seafood has risen more than 27 percent over the past 10 years, remaining steadily higher than other foods and creating significant economic incentives for fraud and illegal fishing.”
Four experts addressed fraud during Wednesday’s briefing: Dr. Michael Hirshfield, Oceana’s senior VP-North America and chief scientist; Ellen Kassoff Gray, general manager and co-owner of Watershed and Equinox, Stephen Vilnit, commercial fisheries outreach and marketing for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources; and William Gergits, managing member of Therion International.
Editor’s note: Learn more about fraud — and how SeafoodSource and SeaFood Business magazine can help you prevent it — by listening to the International Boston Seafood Show conference “Truth in Tare” and the SeafoodSource webinar “Protect yourself from short-weighting,” featuring David Sefcik, a weights and measures expert with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. You must be a SeafoodSource premium member to listen to both the conference and the webinar.
