(Fis.com) Philippines - The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) has lifted the three-month fishing ban on sardines in the Sulu Sea. The 11 sardine canneries and various fishing fleets in Zamboanga City will now be able to resume operations and 30,000 people will go back to work.

(VASEPNews) On 15th February 2012, Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department has sent letter to Trade Service, under Consulate General of Vietnam in Hong Kong to announce its proposed regulation on import control on aquatic products.

(IntraFish) WWF gave a presentation to the European Union (EU) petitions committee today highlighting the need to end overfishing, given that 75 percent of assessed EU fish stocks are overexploited and the EU is losing approximately €3 billion ($4.02 billion) per year in potential income from a failure to manage fisheries sustainably.

(foodsafetynews.com) The United States and China signed a five year agreement on food security, sustainable agriculture, and food safety at an agricultural symposium in Iowa Thursday.

(IntraFish) US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan announced Wednesday the United States and the European Union will soon treat each other's organic standards as equivalent to their own, reported National Public Radio.

(seafood.com) FDA posts Warning Letters each week, which stay on its website for a few days and then “disappear” into an archive and become difficult to find. Those concerning seafood are reported in our Trade Alerts when they are posted.

(TheFishSite) A new report published by the European Commission (EC) recently reveals that more than 9,000 tonnes of food were irradiated in the European Union in 2010. The main findings are summarised by senior editor, Jackie Linden.

(vasep.com.vn) According to National Agro Forestry Fisheries Quality Assurance Department (NAFIQAD), Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) will send a delegation to Vietnam by the middle of February 2012 for inspecting some dried seasoned leather jacket processing plants which exported their products to South Korea.

(TheFishSite) The Deputy Head of the Rosselkhoznadzor, Yevgeny Nepoklonov, has sent a letter to the Administrative Director of the State Service for Plant, Fish, Animal and Food Surveillance to report futher harmful substances and bacteria found in fisheries products from Norway.

(seafood.com) A key report on the future of European fisheries markets will call on the European Commission to establish a new higher standard for eco-labelling across all fisheries products sold in the EU.

(TheFishSite) Companies that want to trade/process ASC-certified seafood products will need to be chain-of-custody certified. ASC has now opened accreditation for certifiers. Once accredited, those certifiers can be contracted by traders/processors choosing to trade ASC-certified products.

(seafood.com) The use of probiotic bacteria, isolated from naturally-occurring bacterial communities, is gaining in popularity in the aquaculture industry as the preferred, environmentally-friendly management alternative to the use of antibiotics and other antimicrobials for disease prevention. Known to the public for their use in yogurt and other foods to improve human digestion and health, probiotic bacteria isolated from other sources can also be used to improve survival, nutrition and disease prevention in larvae grown in shellfish hatcheries.

(IntraFish) The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) will launch it's tilapia standards "within days," thereby officially launching the eco-certification program itself, CEO Chris Ninnes told IntraFish on Tuesday.

(TheFishSite) Two new ISO standards for traceability of fish products have been approved. “These standards will provide consumers around the globe with access to more information about the seafood they eat,” says Senior Scientist Petter Olsen at Nofima in Tromsø, who has headed the work related to the new ISO standards.

(fis.com) After an intensive multi-stakeholder consultation process, the revision of the GLOBALG.A.P. Compound Feed Manufacturing Standard has been finalized. Proposals for amendments of the version 2.0, which was published in 2010, were forwarded by various groups, including retailers, certification bodies, NGOs, and representatives from the milling industry.