![]() ![]() (Oceana released its own seafood fraud studies, about Canadian seafood in 2021 and U.S. Since it’s a keystone species that helps to structure food webs, it’s “also the most highly managed fish species in the world and when you can’t catch them or you can’t meet the regulations to have them imported, it’s easy to label something that looks like tuna, maybe smells like tuna, tastes a little bit like tuna, as tuna,” says Marla Valentine, illegal fishing and transparency campaign director at Oceana. Tuna is one of the most frequently frauded fish out there. First, there’s fish of a lower value (say, tilapia or sometimes allergenic escolar) that’s mislabeled as fish of a higher value (red snapper or tuna). “There might not be an adequate population of a particular species of fish or a specific type of production, and that creates incentives to fill that void with something that is not the food that it’s advertised to be,” Spiegel explains.Īs the CAFS report defines it, fraud falls under five different categories. Ironically, some of this fraud is driven by consumers trying to do the right, and sustainable, thing by avoiding overfished species. It’s a system that offers opportunities for fraud at almost every step of the way: when fish is harvested from the sea by any one of 4.5 million commercial fishing vessels in the world, or transferred from one of those vessels to another, for aggregating when it’s sent off to be processed into filets, or canned, or breaded and frozen when it’s distributed into a country’s wholesale market and when it’s put on sale in shops and restaurants.Īlmost all fraud allows bad actors to garner higher prices for their catch, or to avoid the cost of doing business legally and ethically. ![]() A pollock may be caught in Russian waters, sent to China for processing, then shipped back to the U.S. It comes to us via a complicated network of supply chains that span continents. It has already led to some legislator calls for better oversight and regulation.Īs much as 85 percent of the seafood we eat in this country is imported. But since “ishing is one of the primary means by which human activity affects the health of ocean ecosystems,” among other concerns, as the report puts it, Spiegel and her fellow researchers hope a growing awareness will help change that. “There was greater public outrage about the horsemeat scandal in Europe than the seafood within our country,” Spiegel says. With the exception of the brouhaha over sandwich chain Subway’s tuna, though, in which DNA tests allegedly showed some of their fishy sandwich innards to be “not tuna,” there’s been very little consumer flap about the potential for eating seafood that isn’t what it claims to be. It can present a danger to human health, when unsafe-to-eat fish or potentially harmful processing methods are mislabeled or covered up. It might hide labor violations, when ethics claims about who caught your fish and under what conditions are erroneous. For example, seafood fraud threatens ocean biodiversity, when species of concern are harvested and passed off as something else. ![]() Those occurrences can result in host of serious impacts. ![]() Nevertheless, “Seafood is an industry where we really see the problem of food fraud occurring on a wide scale,” says Emily Spiegel, the report’s co-author. Due to the complexity and opacity of global seafood supply chains, and challenges for NGOs and scientists to examine them comprehensively, estimates of fraud vary wildly, from 16.5 to 75 percent of all fish imported into the U.S. A lot, argue researchers of a new report on seafood fraud from the Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS). ![]()
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