Business

Fish traceability system offers safety model

Taiwan’s well-developed traceability system can ensure quality and safety of fish products from farm to table. (Courtesy of Nan Fan-hua.)

• Publication Date：12/25/2009
• Source： Taiwan Today
• By  Meg Chang

In response to wide-spread public concerns about the safety of food products, many industrialized nations have begun imposing stringent measures to safeguard the health of their citizens. For Taiwan, this means that its food product exporters will need to quickly come up with a way of proving that their goods meet these tough standards.

To this end, the island’s aquaculture sector, with its “traceability system,” may point to a solution that both fish farmers and other food producers from around the nation can follow.

“Over the years, we have successfully bar-coded nearly 1,000 different species of fish, and our supply chain tracking system is now on a par with global standards,” Nan Fan-hua, director of the government-sponsored Traceability Certification Center, told “Taiwan Today” during an interview Dec. 9.

This rarely reported achievement means that aquaculture is one of the unsung heroes in the country’s economic development, Nan added, because “this is one of the few sectors where Taiwan actually plays a leading role in the world.”

The system was first put in place in 2002, but it evolved gradually over a period of several years and had to undergo several setbacks before attaining to its present stage, said Nan, who played a key role in creating the system.

With fish being the most important export item among all of Taiwan’s agricultural products, the Fisheries Agency under the Cabinet-level Council of Agriculture, in collaboration with the country’s academic community, began to promote the Good Aquaculture Practice system on the island roughly eight years ago, according to Nan, who is also an assistant professor at the Department of Aquaculture of National Taiwan Ocean University.

“The idea back then was to create awareness among local fish farmers, so that they understood the importance of maintaining a set of standard operation procedures to ensure product quality,” Nan said.

Another reason was that the government wanted to expand overseas markets for Taiwan’s fish exports. “We had to make sure the local aquaculture sector complied with regulations of other countries.” In particular, the nation’s aquaculture sector had to find a way to meet the stringent requirements set by the European Union, which relies on imports to meet two-thirds of its demand for fish products.

In 2005, three years after the GAP system was set up, several Taiwanese fish exports failed to pass drug screening tests at destination countries. The setback prompted the COA to expand the GAP concept and initiate a traceability system applicable to all of the island’s agricultural products.

“Mandatory traceability of foodstuffs is becoming a standard requirement in international trade,” Nan pointed out. For example, Japan and the European Union are set to impose even stricter regulations on imported foodstuffs from 2010, and only those operators certified by accredited agencies can sell their products to these markets.

So government agencies and experts like Nan set out to formulate procedural guidelines that enable traceability “from farm to table.”

The system requires input of a huge amount of information from participating farmers and an information management system that is both effective and extremely user friendly. With support from the government and private organizations, Nan and his colleagues employed the bar-coding system to compile a database and design a supply chain management system specifically catered to the needs of local aqua operators.

The first step was to create a “global trade item number” for edible fish species, so that they could be identified anywhere in the world. “There was no other country more qualified or capable than Taiwan for this task,” Nan said. The waters surrounding Taiwan are rich in fish, more so perhaps than any other body of water in the world, the professor explained. More than one fourth of the world’s marine species can be found near Taiwan, among which about 300 kinds can be farmed on the island or caught from surrounding waters.

Regular and surprise audits are now performed at fish farms seeking TCC certification to ensure adequate compliance. And when fish farmers sell batches of fish stock to processing plants, they have to detail all relevant information on shipment manifests. The receiving ends have to follow the same guidelines in their operations if they also want be certified by the TCC.

Thus from breeding, raising, transporting, processing, to warehousing and distributing, not a single step is overlooked by the stern eyes of inspectors.

In this way, the system can ensure that both consumers and ethically-run aqua operators are protected against fraudulent practices, because “if and when there is a safety issue, it will be fairly easy to identify the problem by tracing the entire supply chain and attribute responsibilities accordingly,” the professor explained.

The tracking mechanism also applies to wild catches. “In fact, it is an effective way to combat illegal fishing and smuggling,” Nan said, because it will be almost impossible for any fish without adequate documentation to make it to the marketplace. “The government can also formulate more effective fishery policies with such well documented market information,” he added.

Although the government offered full subsidies, it was not easy to convince local aqua operators to participate in the program in the beginning, Nan recalled. “These farmers have been in the business for decades without product certification. Given the amount of extra work involved, especially the need to operate computers, they were hesitant to comply,” the expert noted.

“I explained to them that if Taiwan did not have such a system in place to ensure quality of our own goods, we would not be able to make the same request of imports from countries whose product quality is usually more questionable,” Nan said.

This simple explanation worked. As of the first half of 2009, nearly 500 aqua farmers and processing plants have been certified by the center. Their products now bear the Taiwan Good Aquaculture Practice (TGAP) logo.

Two major tasks lie ahead, the professor explained. The first is to make the traceability even better. “There are loopholes in every system, and it is inevitable to have incidents whereby things get temporarily out of hand,” he said. The government and public alike must ensure that these loopholes and incidents are reduced to a minimum, Nan added.

Another task ahead is to make consumers more aware of the certification system, so that they will be more inclined to show support by purchasing only TCC-certified products. “Consumers have to understand that there is a price tag to all these efforts. Their willingness to share the cost will help the sector develop in a more safety-conscious direction,” the professor pointed out. The government can help by doing more to promote the TGAP logo among consumers, like it did with the Chinese Agricultural Standards (CAS) for fresh produce and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) for manufactured products, he noted.

The next challenge for the expert is to establish a system of certification of origin for the island’s fish products. After years of effort, Taiwan has built a reputation as a country of quality aquaculture exports.

“We should continue to reinforce this premium brand image, because this will help differentiate our exports in global markets and create more added value for our fish products,” Nan said.

Write to Meg Chang at meg.chang@mail.gio.gov.tw