2. PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES

The participants at the workshop included national counterparts from the ASEAN countries comprising:

- focal points for the ASEAN Sectoral Working Group on Fisheries and
- a representative from the national agencies in the ASEAN countries with competence for coordination on the issues of harmonization and equivalence of standards for shrimp products

FAO provided resource persons with competence in health and safety in seafood products, and also aquaculture production and management. The ASEAN Secretariat provided a resource person with competence in fisheries issues and the ASEAN processes that concerned regional harmonization and equivalence and trade with other regions. As lead country for the task force, the Department of Fisheries Thailand provided several additional resource persons competent in seafood safety and quality, the shrimp farms' code of conduct certification programme, as well as aquatic animal health.

A list of participants is given in Appendix 1.

The workshop was opened with statements from the Thai Department of Fisheries, the ASEAN Secretariat and the regional office of the Food and Agriculture Organization. These statements can be found in Appendix 2.

The strategic planning workshop process included presentations by country representatives which outlined the current status of their national mechanisms for safety and quality of exported shrimp. The presentations also included references to the various national initiatives that had been undertaken to improve the quality of the shrimp produced at farm level. A synthesis of the country papers is presented in Section 4.

Resource persons at the workshop made presentations covering the following subject areas:

- a description of the steps required and issues which need to be covered in the development of regionally harmonized standards and quality management systems (Presented paper);

- presentations on global harmonization and equivalence^[2] efforts (FAO HQ); and

- strategic approaches in the region for addressing the problem of shrimp product quality at the farm level (with emphasis on cluster approach and certification systems).

The workshop process included three working group sessions which were dedicated to the task of identifying issues and solutions to the following three key areas of harmonization and equivalence:

- how to initiate a process to conclude Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRA);

- how the concept of an acceptable level of risk to the domestic and export food chains could be applied as a tool for encouraging equivalence and how to establish Risk Analysis as a basis for strengthening the negotiating position of producers;

- identification of the existing and potential mechanisms for achieving harmonization and equivalence.

The report of the workshop is a synthesis of the outputs of the working groups discussions and indicates areas for action and possible mechanisms by which this may be achieved.

The schedule of the workshop can be found in Appendix 3.