Tag: basa

Agriculture: U.S. State Requires Catfish Origins

Vietnam News Brief Service
July 8, 2010

Tennessee State government in the U.S. has issued a new law to require country-of-origin labeling on catfish products from the Mississippi or the Mekong Delta since July 1, said the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP).

This is the third state after Mississippi and Arkansas to require restaurants and retail stores to tell customers where they get their catfish, with a view to make catfish safer for consumers and to help level a playing field for American catfish farmers.

However, the law will not hurt Vietnamese tra and basa fish exports to the market as the products are not classified as catfish given a 2002 federal mandate, Truong Dinh Hoe, general secretary of VASEP was cited by the Thoi Bao Kinh Te Sai Gon online newspaper as saying.

He added that most Vietnamese tra and basa fish products are exported to California and eastern states.

Vietnam earned $539 million from exporting 250,000 tons of tra and basa fish in the first half of this year, up 13% and 21% on year, respectively.

Food Safety Website SAFECATFISH.COM Launched Today

Highlights Dangers of Imported Catfish

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release:
May 24, 2010

A new food safety website promoting tougher inspections and regulation of imported and domestic catfish is being launched Monday, May 24, at www.safecatfish.com.

The website exposes the health and safety dangers to American consumers created by the Food and Drug Administration’s weak inspection system for imported seafood. The site includes a graphic new investigative report, “Dirty Waters, Dangerous Fish,” which shows current evidence of unsafe catfish farming practices along the polluted and contaminated Mekong River in Vietnam.

Currently the FDA, which is responsible for the inspection of catfish and other seafood, inspects only two percent of the 5.2 billion pounds of seafood imported into the United States from foreign countries, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Among the two percent of seafood imports from Vietnam inspected by the FDA during a recent four-year period, nearly one in every five shipments was found to contain catfish and other seafood products contaminated with potentially deadly chemicals or drugs that are banned by the United States in farm-raised catfish, according to FDA records.

The U.S. Congress, responding to evidence of serious problems with the quality of imported catfish, voted two years ago to move catfish inspections and regulation from the FDA to USDA. This important food safety law has become entangled in bureaucratic red tape, and is now being threatened by yet more delays. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which has no authority over food safety issues, is holding up the law over concerns that protecting U.S. consumers could harm Vietnamese fish farmers and U.S.-Vietnamese trade relations.

The new website, www.safecatfish.com, also will post on Monday a new series of letters between Congressional offices and the federal agencies involved in enforcing the law that reveal political efforts to dilute important food safety protections.

The political attempts to derail the law designed to protect American consumers comes as the amount of catfish imported to the United States from Vietnam is increasing dramatically. Vietnamese catfish imports have quadrupled in the past five years from 19 million pounds in 2004 to 85 million in 2009, according to U.S. government figures.

The website also provides links to numerous Vietnamese and other Asian news media accounts of Vietnamese government officials warning their own catfish farmers to improve farm safety practices, halt the use of drugs banned in other countries and upgrade the quality of the water used in their catfish ponds.

Contact:
1-888-486-4150
info@safecatfish.com
www.safecatfish.com

Vietnam: Unqualified seafood for export on alarm

Vietnam News Summary
May 6, 2010

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.

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.

Vietnam Association for Seafood Exporters and Processors (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.