Testing practices of seafood exporters should be modified to meetstandards and to improve the quality of products, said VietnamAssociation of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP).
Theassociation proposed to socialise testing activities in order to satisfyincreasing demand and to maintain food safety, by moving the testingphase forward from the exported consignments to the raw material.
Thisstep is necessary because existing food safety policies on seafoodexports have resulted in a loss of time and money for exporters, saidVASEP deputy general secretary Nguyen Hoai Nam.
Testing fees forfinished-seafood products before export have almost doubled. Exportersmust spend seven to 10 days procuring the samples for testing andimplementing administrative procedures to control food safety.
Namsaid the testing fee is on average between 5 million VND (238 USD) and15 million VND (714 USD) for each container of the product. Seafoodexporters must pay 1-4 billion VND (47,600-190,400 USD) each year forone testing company's services, even if they run the tests themselves.
Eachyear, the fisheries sector exports 1.2 million tonnes of seafoodproducts. If 20 percent of that export volume is tested, the sector mustspend a huge sum of money on testing activities, Nam said.
VASEPgeneral secretary Truong Dinh Hoe said the NationalAgro-Forestry-Fisheries Quality Assurance Department (Nafiqad) shouldstudy the food safety controls for seafood products used by the EU andthe US. Not only do they represent key export markets for Vietnameseseafood products, but they also have strict policies that govern thechoice of raw material, processing and export procedures and packagingstandards, Hoe said.
Ensuring food safety from the early stageswill be more efficient than tests on export consignments, which can onlyscreen for certain strains of bacteria, he added./.