The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that
Americans consumed roughly 5 billion pounds of seafood in 2007. Most seafood buyers -- supermarkets, restaurants, individual consumers and importers -- assume they are buying a particular seafood, not realizing that the seller may have led them astray.
Sometimes, the GAO says, seafood sellers mislabel the products in order to sell them as something they were not. The GAO says government agencies do not do a good job coordinating with each other so, as a result, most seafood is not inspected.
The fraud generally takes these forms, the GAO says [PDF]:
- Transshipment to avoid duties: Foreign producers may ship seafood products on route to the United States through a third country to avoid import duties by labeling the product's country of origin as the third country and also to avoid regulatory controls such as FDA import alerts.
- Over-treating: Processors may, for example, over-bread prepared seafood products, use water-retaining chemicals, or over-glaze with an ice covering to artificially increase the weight of seafood products without indicating the true net weight of the seafood on the label.
- Species substitution: Participants in the seafood supply chain may label a species of seafood as another species. Typically, a lower-market-value species is labeled as a higher-market-value species to realize a larger profit. This results in consumers paying too much for the product.
- Short-weighting: Participants in the seafood supply chain may label packages of seafood as containing more than they actually contain.
- Other mislabeling and misrepresenting: Participants in the seafood supply chain may provide various types of incorrect information about the seafood product or can commingle two or more different products having different values but sell the entire lot at the value of the highest priced product.
USA Today reported:
"It's an industry-wide issue," says Gavin Gibbons of the industry's National Fisheries Institute.
The report notes that seafood companies routinely receive written solicitations to buy fraudulent products. But the report says that when the National Fisheries Institute forwarded several solicitations to the FDA last year, the agency took no action.
Consumers who called the FDA after buying mislabeled seafood also got nowhere. One consumer complained about frozen shrimp labeled as a product of Mexico that had a second label underneath indicating it was a product of Thailand.
Though the FDA wouldn't comment directly on the report, Kwisnek did say that "resource constraints have forced the FDA to prioritize food safety issues above issues of economic fraud."
Something Fishy with Seafood Marketing ... Sorry, I just couldn't...
