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Fishery and aquaculture products are among the world’s most traded commodities internationally.One of the biggest difficulties for exporters is dealing with the different requirements of food safety frameworks in each country to which they export their products.

These involve import regulations, requirements, and control procedures, in many cases starting with border controls, which fishery and aquaculture products can be detained, destroyed, or rejected if they do not meet the requirements in force in that country.

The issue for some companies is to understand and have easy access to border procedures, legislation and requirements in their export markets.

The Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of FAO organized a Workshop on Risk Based Fish Inspection at Borders in Rome on October 30th, 31st and November 1st, 2019 with experts from Canada, China, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain. The aim of the workshop was to analyse the differences among fish inspection systems and understand how risk assessment exercises are carried out in the different countries, with the purpose to promote harmonization and equivalent standards and import inspection procedures among seafood trading countries.

During the workshop, it was identified that, for some countries, the main cause of detentions and rejections was under a broad category, non-food safety specific, and the decision to further explore these issues and their origin was taken. For this purpose, FAO decided to launch a survey, that  targets industries that export fishery and aquaculture products and aims to have a better understanding of the main issues that companies may have in the food safety area when exporting their products.

The information gathered from this survey will be included in the Report of the Workshop that the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of FAO is currently developing. The name of the companies will be kept confidential.

The purpose of this survey is to:

• Identify the main issues that companies may face at when exporting fishery products;
• Gather information on border detentions and rejections, such as product type, reason for the detentions or rejections, as well as, if possible, the more detailed information provided by the importing country to the company about the reasons for the detentions or rejections, the resulting dialogue and the end result of the case;
• Gather information related the economic impact of the detentions and rejections;
• Identify the main knowledge gaps regarding requirements on additives, contaminants, microbiological criteria, histamine, labelling, packaging and in general all the food safety requirements;
• Gather information regarding the utility and possibility for improvement of the sections on regulations and rejections on the Globefish website;
• Evaluate whether new tools and guidance documents need to be developed. 

Estimated Survey Length: The survey should take about 20 minutes to complete.

We would appreciate if you can share the survey within your networks.

Thank you very much.

Click here to start the SURVEY  

Complete the SURVEY in SPANISH