Unqualified seafood for export on alarm

Along with facing the unrecovered export price and the material shortage, seafood companies also have to confront many difficulties when many Vietnam’s seafood shipments for export violated seriously the food quality standards in the first three months of 2010.

EU, one of the major import markets of Vietnam processed seafood has a lot of strict rules on food safety and hygiene. Before signing deal to import seafood of Vietnamese businesses, EU customers usually carefully seek infrastructure of processing facilities, catch origin of products from the breeding environment, foodstuff, care method and others. However, according to EU’s Rasff Portal notification, the organisation gave the warning to three shipments of seafood from Vietnam in March 2010, bringing total number of shipments of Vietnam subject to EU’s warnings to six. Two of three warned shipments in March contained the amount of Neomycin antibiotic exceeding the allowable limit. Neomycin is an amino glycoside antibiotic extracted from mushroom. Similar to other amino glycosides, neomycin has excellent activity against Gram negative bacteria, and has partial activity against Gram positive bacteria. It is relatively toxic to humans, and many people have allergic reactions to it. The kind of antibiotic is used limitedly in seafood raising and production and newly listed in EU’s warning system.

In another major market, Japan, 19 unqualified seafood shipments (affected by antibiotic and banned chemicals) are delivered from Vietnam to Japan, accounting for one third of total warned shipment volume of the foreign country. Vietnam Association for Seafood Exporters and Processors (Vasep) ordered Vietnamese firms to focus this. Japan also proposed Vietnam should launch the activities to popularise kinds of banned chemicals and antibiotic for farmers, fishermen and material supply agents, build up a standard production process.

Through examining the residues of banned chemicals and antibiotic at enterprises, it showed that the main reason of Vietnam’s unqualified seafood came from the pre-processing period such as breeding, material preservation after catching.

So, Vietnam is proposed to strengthen the supervision on import, distribution and usage of veterinary medicines.

Nguyen Bich Van, managing director of Thai Hung Long Production, Trading Import Export Co Ltd at a recent meeting on seafood export said that many exporters only care prevailing prices and profits without deep awareness of the importance of product quality whereas consumers nowadays are willing to spend more to have safe products.

Vasep reported that the number of Vietnamese seafood processors and exporters having good preparation for getting Certificate of Origin (C/O) and Global GAP of EU is very small.

In January-April, the country’s seafood export earned $1.2 billion dong including $350 million of April, growing by 17.4 percent year-on-year. EU continues leading Vietnam’s seafood buyers, followed by Japan and US. The target of seafood export turnover at $4.5 billion in 2010, a year-on-year growth of 7.1 percent can be reached but Vietnam could miss the target if not dealing with the aforementioned problem absolutely.

Tags: Vietnam Seafood, Vietnam seafood exports