In recent years the aquaculture industry has been under strain to keep pace with developments and changes in food safety legislation. A worldwide rise in food poisoning outbreaks and the publicity attached to a number of food fraud scandals has increased consumer pressure on governments to ensure consumer protection through improved legislation. All food producing industries now need to comply and to accept the responsibility for the production of safe food, principally through the introduction of control systems based on hazard analysis critical control point theory (“own checks” in the EC). These replace end product inspection. There has inevitably been resistance and misunderstandings but the situation is rapidly improving. In order to enter profitable European markets both domestic production and imports from third countries must be produced under control and be accompanied by production records. It is apparent that the individual small producers have difficulty in understanding and keeping up with legislative changes in such aspects as consumer health and safety as well as environmental protection. This can best be addressed by providing information and training to the industry.
In common with other sectors of the fishing industry, the aquaculture industry in the last few years has had to develop management systems in a pro-active way in order to provide consumer assurance of product safety and, increasingly that production is from sustainable resources. As a result a growing number of aquaculture and fisheries codes of conduct and certification programmes have been developed or are under development. These take many forms from advisory, voluntary to mandatory and are led by government, private sector or joint initiatives. An outline of some of the programmes is presented in Appendix 3.
There are also numerous private label schemes established by producers and retailers. These vary in nature but usually try to convince consumers via an attached logo or label that the product meets certain standards.
As a consequence of the large number of eco-labelling schemes in operation the EC issued a draft publication entitled ‘A Community Approach towards Eco-Labelling of Fisheries Products’ in February 2001. This stresses that national authorities should require that all fisheries eco-labelling schemes comply with the following requirements:
An EC labelling requirement, to come into effect on 1 January 2002, has also been issued. It requires some fish products to be labelled, indicating the location of the production site, the commercial designation of the species and whether the product is wild or farmed.
Organically certified aquaculture is an important recent development. It is evident that consumer confidence in the safety and integrity of the food supply has been eroded by a number of scandals. A section of relatively affluent, environmentally conscious, consumers have turned to the organic movement to certify the integrity of the products they purchase. They are prepared to pay a premium of up to 75 percent for such products from aquaculture. There are as yet no internationally agreed regulations for organic aquaculture and so standard setting is still largely a private matter although verified by third parties and governed by legislation regarding protection of consumers and fair competition in the market. There are, however, supplementary national regulations in some EC Member States (for instance France and the UK both have national regulations on organic aquaculture). It is anticipated that the requirements that have been codified for other organic products will be extended to aquaculture. These are:
http://www.codexalimentarius.net/STANDARD/standard.htm ftp://ftp.fao.org/codex/standard/organic/gl99 32e.pdf
The organic market offers a promising future for European aquaculture producers who can meet the requirements. However, the increased production costs, lower productivity and the multiplicity of competing private certifying bodies have so far discouraged most producers from turning to organic production. Despite these obstacles, the organic segment has developed at an interesting pace in recent years. There is some controversy about whether the whole aquaculture industry will be forced to go organic, but the general feeling is that this will remain a high-value niche segment.
