4. Conclusions and recommendations

The two preceding chapters have detailed the regulations governing imports into the European Union, the United States of America, Japan and Canada and have presented and discussed the data available about the border cases (detentions, rejections, reexports, etc.) in the same countries/regions.

Key issues coming from these chapters have included a need to harmonize the procedures and methods used to govern imports, to base the actions taken on risk assessment where consumer safety is in question, and importantly to communicate the actions taken to all interested parties in a manner that is unambiguous, transparent and easily obtained and analysed. The final section of the previous chapter discussed several issues in more detail and provided recommendations as to how to improve harmonization.

This final chapter will make recommendations about what governments, and industry also, can and should do to facilitate trade in fish and fish products. It will also suggest further work that needs to be undertaken in this important, and not well studied, part of international trade.

4.1 Border inspection systems

The ultimate goal must surely be to have safe fish and fish products freely crossing borders with no impediments to trade unless the product will have a negative impact on consumers. Negative impact includes safety risk, quality defect or economic fraud.

As indicated earlier, there is growing and strong evidence that the implementation of HACCP-based systems have contributed to improve fish safety and quality, but there is also a growing awareness of the need for an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to food safety and quality, considering the entire food chain. The implementation of the food chain approach requires an enabling policy and a regulatory environment at national and international levels with clearly defined rules and standards, establishment of appropriate food control systems and programme at national and local levels, and provision of appropriate training and capacity building.

Likewise, fish safety and quality from a food chain perspective should incorporate the three fundamental components of risk analysis - assessment, management and communication - and, within this analysis process, there should be an institutional separation of science-based risk assessment from risk management - which is the regulation and control of risk.

As with the advent of HACCP and the move away from end product testing towards quality assurance techniques, it would seem that the same arguments about the failure of sampling to find failed products should apply to border control. Also, the HACCP/risk analysis approach is equally valid for use at borders - find what is critical to control in the whole trade system and then control those risks at the appropriate point. This may not necessarily be at the border. Where the control point is a border then put in systems to make sure the process does not go out of control. This requires measurement and limits.

For food safety issues, this would mean a move away from random sampling at borders. However, it would also necessitate a more complete understanding than we have at present of the main points in the food chain where a risk to consumer health is both high and likely to happen. This is where good science will provide answers, and why governments must put such science as a priority for funding. The limited number of risk assessments to date needs to be expanded rapidly and internationally to provide the framework to ensure that unsafe food is not produced, or if it is, it is removed from the food chain. However, the systems used must also strive to remove the possibility of interrupting trade flows unnecessarily through inappropriate border actions.

Recently, a report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the National Academies in the United States has concluded:

"The report also addressed safety criteria and concerns surrounding produce and seafood. Rather than rely on random screening of a small percentage of seafood imports, FDA should take steps to increase the understanding and application of its comprehensive guide for seafood safety in international commerce of fish and shellfish to ensure that safety hazards are properly detected and addressed prior to shipment".

In a separate study, examination of United States data concluded that Salmonella is a potential target for risk reduction efforts (Allshouse et al., 2003), and that most Salmonella contamination detentions are for shrimp. From the wider examination of border case data in this report and the discussions in the previous section, these conclusions can be rather limiting in that Salmonella in cultured shrimp may not be a significant safety risk (see 3.6.8) and that other contaminants are more worthy of risk reduction efforts, for instance, veterinary drugs in aquaculture products, heavy metals in some larger species, histamine in some fish species, etc.

In addition to safety issues, many governments consider it their duty to control food to protect consumer from fraudulous practices and provide for fair trade practices. Unfortunately, several countries advocate presently the use of HACCP-based approaches to control safety hazards and end product control (whether at the border or before) for quality defects and economic frauds. The control of quality defects and economic fraud should also adopt a similar approach so that the control is at the points where the fraud is most likely to happen.

However, it must be recognized that the risk analysis approach does not have all the data yet needed to use this approach exclusively and several gaps still exist in the scientific literature. Also, some aspects of inspection do not always involve risks to human health, for instance, labelling, species substitutes and documentation issues. Therefore, the current practices of inspection will continue in the near future, mostly based on physical inspection with further examination of suspect lots.

However, as alluded to earlier, whether non-safety issues are handled by the same systems as food safety issues is an important point to be agreed upon internationally for consistency in international trade building on the ongoing work of the CCFFP on the Code of Practice for Fish and Fishery Products. This Codex committee recommends HACCP to deal with all safety and quality issues, using mandatory Critical Control Points (CCP) for safety hazards and voluntary Defect Action Points (DAP) for quality issues.

4.2 Border control data

Irrespective of the system employed, border control and inspection takes place on a daily basis and will continue to be so for some time before a fully-fledged "prevention at source" approach is harmonized and traceability schemes are well implemented to provide transparency among trading partners. This data is clearly valuable to the industry, but is also valuable to the inspection agencies to improve their systems, and to policy-making or advising bodies that can advise on best practice.

Unfortunately, the data is not both readily available and easily analysed with the exception possibly of Canada, though even these data are not complete in an ideal world. The previous chapter also noted the main fields that are completed for each record, though it varied slightly between the four countries/regions studied, and also noted the complete absence of either quantity or value of consignments where border actions were taken, important information to put figures to the costs involved in border control.

The paucity of this information in the public domain is a constraint to an understanding of the facts about border cases and their effect on trade. It also suggests a lack of transparency by those countries that do not make the data known. Without this data, it becomes more difficult to make sensible recommendations about what both importing and exporting countries can do to improve the situation. However, given the data available and analysed in this document, some recommendations can be made to improve the current situation.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission has already published the combined texts for Food Import and Export Inspection and Certification Systems in the late 1990s. This provides guidelines for food import and export inspection and certification systems, including how to exchange information. It would be sensible for the CAC to extend these guidelines to take into consideration the above issues.

4.3 Export performance and development assistance

The globalization and further liberalization of world fish trade, while offering many benefits and opportunities, also presents new and emerging safety and quality challenges. Fish safety and quality assurance in the new millennium requires enhanced levels of international cooperation in setting up standards and regulations. The SPS/TBT agreements of the WTO and the benchmarking role of the Codex provide an international platform in this respect. Consequently, the major fish producing, exporting or importing countries have launched, in the early 1990s, an overhaul of fish inspection regulations to set up the foundations for the implementation of the HACCP-based quality and safety systems. This is in conformity with the guidelines of the CAC. Regulations enacted by the European Union and the United States of America have increased the pace and set the trend for many other countries, especially the major commercial partners of the European Union and the United States of America. This highlights the need for better harmonization and recognition schemes. More recently, several countries have initiated national works on microbiological risk assessment, but several gaps and differences still exist. These differences provoke questions such as:

• How can we achieve common understanding of equivalence and of recognition/ equivalence schemes?

• Why is the progressive implementation of HACCP not always leading to a gradual decrease in end-product sampling and inspection, including at borders?

• Is it realistic to expect a harmonization of microbiological standards for fish and fishery products?

On many of these issues, developing countries are at a disadvantage because of insufficient/inadequate national capacities and resources. International organizations such as FAO will need more resources to address the increasing requests from member countries.

What does also become evident, is that we could do with more data. This has already been concluded in the previous section.

However, with increasing demand for fish and seafood, the importance of the fisheries sector to the economies of many developing nations and the importance of developing nation exports to world trade in fish and fish products, the data does suggest that further assistance in safe seafood production is warranted.