The Hindu Business Line : Centre to set up body for ensuring fish quality

Kochi, Sept. 28 With the growing need of total quality management in seafood production, post-harvest handling has assumed paramount importance. While India has world-class seafood processing plants which take care of the final stages of post-harvest handling, concerted efforts are lacking in the initial stages of the quality chain, the Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) has said.

To counter this inherent problem of the seafood industry, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry is setting up a registered society under MPEDA called Network for Fish Quality Management and Sustainable Fishing (NETFISH). The society will be inaugurated by the Minister of State for Commerce, Mr Jairam Ramesh, in Kochi on October 1.

Though MPEDA has been organising extension programmes for fishermen and other categories, these efforts have not produced the desired results owing to vastness of the problem and the absence of an effective machinery at work, at the grass root level. As a result, the extension programmes have remained a class room exercise with little or no impact, the MPEDA acknowledged.

The setting up of the society is expected to dispel the feeling among the fishermen of being left out of MPEDA programmes because of the lack of reach. For guaranteeing the quality of seafood, MPEDA had to evolve a new mechanism for capacity building and quality management at the grass roots level by networking with fishermen societies, federations and other non-governmental organisations, which work closely with the fishermen communities.

“The conventional system of extension through the official machinery needs to be replaced by an agency which can reach out to grassroots level and mobilise organisations whose primary objective is to work for the welfare of the fishermen. Such an agency will be far more effective in imparting training to fishermen and fish workers and thus bring about a “bottom up” approach to post harvest handling,” it pointed out.

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