Unsafe seafood exports: no solutions?

17:17' 26/07/2007 (GMT+7)

VietNamNet Bridge – How to minimise exports of seafood with antibiotics remains an unanswerable question, though management authorities have taken a lot of measures to control the quality of exports. Manyl batches of food exported to the US have been rejected by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently. In the latest news, on July 19, the FDA seized all consignments of crab from Vietnam for the same reason: chloramphenicol. This substance, found in the imports, is prohibited by US laws on food processing. Seafood material uncontrollable HCM City-based Hai Nam Company has not exported crab to the US for three years, though, according to the company’s Director, Nguyen Thi Thu Sac, crab exports can bring the highest profit among export items to the US market. Yet, Hai Nam has just found its name on the list of the companies that cannot get customs clearance for their crab meat without examination which has been made public by the FDA. FDA has also announced it had rejected 240 batches of food imports from Vietnam in the first six months of the year due to problems of food hygiene, returning the imports to the country. Most of the rejected imports were frozen seafood, both preliminarily treated and already processed. According to Mrs Sac, exports to the US are processed from materials collected from fishermen, and are always infected with chloramphenicol because material collectors for preliminary treatment like using the substance to keep the material fresh. The owner of another enterprise which was also named on the newly declared list of FDA said that FDA did not miss his case, though the exports were made two years ago. He said that appearance on the FDA’s list would severely damage the prestige of enterprises, making it more difficult for the enterprises to export goods, because nearly all countries which imported seafood from Vietnam referred to the FDA’s website. Inspected already, but… still has antibiotics Under current laws, seafood products must be supervised and examined by the National Fisheries Quality Assurance and Veterinary Directorate (Nafiqaved) before shipping. Though Nafiqaved inspected the exports already, and exporters had to pay $30/container for the inspection, the FDA still found antibiotic residues in the seafood. How? According to Mrs Sac, the inspectors just took samples at random, while a consignment of seafood may include products processed from different sources of material. In some cases, the inspections carried out by different inspection centres gives different results. Where will the rejected batches of seafood go? According to Huynh Thi Thanh Giang, Deputy Director General of the An Giang Seafood Import-Export Company, the rejected seafood cannot be consumed domestically. She said that the rejected products must be recycled or have their purposes changed. The only way for enterprises to minimise losses when products are discovered as containing antibiotics, according to Mrs Giang, is to look for easier-to-please markets. (Source: SGTT, Viet Nam Net)