Seafood returned not only due to food safety
(vasep.com.vn) Vietnam was listed in the top three exporters who has the most fish and fishery seafood consigments returned the most by EU, the U.S., Japan and Australia. It was also considered as the country having the highest rate of returned shipments in term of value for exports to the EU, the U.S. and Japan.
Vietnam‘s annual average lost value from returned seafood is US$14 million mainly due to contamination. These are untrustworthy conclusions of United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) published in the workshop titlled “Meeting standards – winning markets: how to address compliance challenges of the seafood value chain” held by National Agro Forestry Fisheries Quality Assurance (NAFIQAD) in cooperation with UNIDO and Institute of Developing Economies – Japan External Trade Organisation (IDE-JETRO) on March 21, 2013.
In its report, UNIDO had not publish the source of data to calculate and get the figure of US$14 million.
In fact, official food safety alert systems such as the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) only listed the rejected consigment without details of value.
The returned seafood can not be totally alleged to food safety violances, but due to many different reasons. In some cases,some exporters decided to get back their products for package design in response to partners’ demand. Some consigments was returned by FDA due to filths that are not considered risk for food safety.
Morever, with the annual average value of seafood exports from Vietnam to four mentioned markets from 2006 to 2011, the figure of US$14 million of returned seafood (as calculated by UNIDO) accounted for a insignificant proportion of 0.39 percent.
UNIDO’s calculating and analysing method based on average export value to get the rate of returned cargo is improper and inconvincible because of different volumes, values and prices of seafood from diffirent countries. The rate should be calculated basing on number of export consigments.
Vietnam is exporting seafood to 160 markets. To maintain major markets and get strong foothold in many markets, Vietnamese government, food safety authorised agencies, local seafood companies make continuous efforts and Vietnamese products get positive assessments of international certification organisations on food safety.
Currently, Vietnam has 567 industrial seafood processing plants meeting international standards like HACCP, GMP, SSOP; more than 400 freezing factories with production capacity of 7.500 MT; 415 processing plantsqualified for exporting to the EU (compared to 2000: 17 plants only); and many other processing plants and fish farms certified by voluntary certification programs like GlobalGAP, ASC, BAP, BRC…