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A worker uses a knife to filet a salmon in a supermarket in Northern California. The Oceana group would like the government to require all fish imported into the United States to have tags documenting when, where, and how the seafood was caught, to prevent fraud. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The seafood Americans buy from the grocery store or restaurant is frequently mislabeled due to an industry rife with fraud, a global charity says.
Consumers are paying high prices for items like wild salmon, snapper, and Atlantic cod, while 25 to 70 percent of the time, the fish is really less desirable, cheaper, and more readily available species, independent testing shows.
Seafood fraud is a big problem, said Dr. Michael Hirshfield, senior vice president for North America and chief scientist for Oceana, the world’s largest ocean conservation group.
“We can track organic bananas back to packing stations on farms in Central and Latin America, yet consumers are given little to no information about one of the most popular foods in the United States—seafood,” said Dr. Hirshfield, at a press conference launching an awareness-raising campaign last week.
Oceana would like the government to require all fish imported into the United States to have tags documenting when, where, and how the seafood was caught. This would enable regulators to chart a product’s path through the global supply chain, and increase accountability.
“There are no longer any excuses for seafood fraud. We’ve got the technology to trace our seafood—and that’s good for everyone from the fisherman to the consumer,” said Stephen Vilnit, commercial fisheries outreach and marketing manager at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
Bait and Switch: How Seafood Fraud Hurts Our Oceans and Health, a report released by Oceana, found that only 2 percent of imported seafood is inspected for potential health hazards, while even less is checked for fraudulent labeling.
Therion International, a leading DNA testing facility specializing in animal species identification, has conducted independent testing of over 1,000 seafood samples from all U.S. states.
“Results from our DNA lab show that about half the time the fish you are eating is not the species listed on the menu,” said William Gergits, co-founder and managing member of Therion.
With about 1,700 different species of seafood from all over the world available in the United States, it is unrealistic to expect consumers to be able to accurately determine the kind of fish they purchase, Oceana points out.
According to the report, the motives and the means to commit seafood fraud are numerous. Illegal fish can be mixed with responsibly caught seafood while vessels are still at sea, duplicates of paperwork can serve as fake IDs for illegal products, illegal fish might be hidden underneath allowable catches, and inspectors might be bribed while fishermen bring seafood to shore.
During processing, different fish can easily be mixed together and passed off as a single species. Many packaged seafood products sold in grocery stores do not list the exact fish variety, nor a country of origin.
The difference in price between a well-known fish species such as red snapper and a look-alike can be considerable, greatly increasing the economic incentive for fraud. Fish may also be mislabeled in order to circumvent duties and tariffs.
In 2007, a group of American fishermen created the Better Seafood Board (BSB), in an attempt to provide a mechanism to address the problems of seafood fraud. It provides restaurants, retail operations, manufacturers, and suppliers a place to report problems.
The BSB has also archived cases where violators have been prosecuted by U.S. justice authorities. In comparison to the number of problems, such cases are rare.
On May 24, a seafood wholesaler, Thomas Katz of Universal Group Inc. was sentenced by the Department of Justice to one year probation, and a fine of $75,000 for purchasing and selling falsely labeled fish.
In January, a pair of wholesalers, Karen Blyth and David Phelps were convicted of 13 felony offenses for their role in purchasing and selling farm-raised Asian catfish, and Lake Victoria perch falsely labeled as grouper, a popular fish found in the Gulf of Mexico. They were also selling foreign, farm-raised shrimp, falsely labeled as U.S. wild-caught shrimp.
Oceana would like the government to better implement existing laws, increase the number of inspections, and improve coordination and information sharing among federal agencies.
They would also like to see the government adopt a traceability scheme for seafood, from catcher to point of purchase, as the best assurance for consumers wishing to make informed choices.
