‘India implementing several safety measures for exporting shrimps'

The US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) has said that India is implementing several of FDA's recommendations that were intended to “better assure the safety of shrimp being exported to the United States.”

In a letter dated June 15, Mr William Jones, Acting Deputy Director for Office of Food Safety, Centre for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, FDA, said that in April 2010 the Agency had sent a team of aquaculture experts to assess India's overall control of veterinary drug residues in products intended for the US market.

Reports indicate that this was in response to concerns expressed by the Southern Shrimp Alliance over significant increase in shrimp shipments from an Indian exporter. The consignments were subject to two separate Import Alerts. The Southern Shrimp Alliance is a group of eight US state shrimp fishermen and processors that had successfully got anti-dumping duty implemented on Indian shrimp exports to the US.

The US Food and Drug Administration also provided additional details regarding the agency's efforts to address the continuing problem of the use of banned antibiotics in shrimp aquaculture, the report said.

Mandatory testing

The Seafood Exporters Association of India (SEAI) said that far more substantive developments have taken place in the last one year. Now shrimps from all the registered farms in the country are mandatorily tested before they can be harvested. No exporter is permitted to buy shrimps without the mandatory pre-harvest testing.

And for the shrimp exporters, it has not been just the samples that were being tested, the whole shrimp consignment to the US has to be tested, Mr Anwar Hashim, President of SEAI, said.

The same is the case for shrimp exports to Europe as well. No exporter in the country entertains shrimps that have not obtained the pre-harvesting certificates and no port in the country will permit exports that are not certified.

The FDA letter also asserts that India has implemented several of the FDA's recommendations “including a mandatory pre-harvest sample and testing programme for unapproved residues for all shrimp exported to the US.”

As a result, the agency's sampling programme could detect nitrofurans and associated metabolites in 2.9 per cent of shrimp and shrimp products in 2010, a sharp drop from the levels of previous year.

Pre-harvest sample

The FDA believed that one reason for this decline was India's adoption of pre-harvest sampling and testing programmes.

While admitting that the implementation of testing programmes are encouraging, FDA was uncertain whether it would be sufficient to meaningfully address the problem of banned and harmful antibiotics used in shrimp aquaculture.

Although it is frequently contended that increased testing is not the solution to the problem of harmful contaminants in farmed seafood, the FDA's recommendations confirm that increased testing is a vital tool in addressing the problem, the report said.

Citing the case of India, where hardly any shrimp consignment to the US has generated any import alert during the first seven months of the current year, exporters said increased testing in India was providing the solution.

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