Traceability in Seafood Necessary For Whom?
Excessive, illegal, improper caught and processed, inappropriate cold chain stored and transported, miss labeled seafood are impacting our healths and sea habitats negatively.
Governments and nonprofit establishments are setting some rules to prevent fraud actions; however, no system so far happened to be successful in third world countries where the massive amount of seafood supplies are coming from. Every day you can see new regulations on media which they are actively telling that hoping to see some changes on anti frauding.
Well, the problem with regulations is they are written by administrators who thought those would be beneficial, well now on at least. Suggesting new regulations is like telling someone to stop doing something but not asking why he is doing and never trying to understand or solve his problems first hand. It is like saying don’ t to that and leaving him alone after.
What we should always remember is all those trades, transactions, and businesses are taking place to reach end consumers.
What end consumers checkings are the brand and prices most of the time. How many of us reading the labels on the back of food packages and verifying the origin of foods to see where they are coming or how processing? Maybe we check the nutrition values if we are on a diet; otherwise, we only review the price, the brand, and then put it in our shopping cart. Why we are doing that is because we choose to trust companies and markets.
Is This a New Trend?
In a world where trends are changing rapidly, transparency or traceability is the new concept where we often hear about it but no idea for real. Transparency is to know the origin of fish, catching or culturing methods, feeding, processing, labeling, transporting and storing conditions with producer and processor company policies including their suppliers, employment, sustainability, creating value policies to the environment and community. Those data are necessary for creating a transparent and responsible seafood. Which sounds not very easy to do, right?
In an industry where human power is cheap, and profit-minded corporations are ruling, mentioning that transparency is only to fool ourselves, sorry.
The good news is today’s technology allowing in aquaculture and fishery to be more open. Yes, it needs investments, and ROI’ s are long. Using tagging and tracking devices in fisheries, IoT devices in culturing and processing, blockchain system for transactions and temperature-controlled transportations and warehouses providing safer and more transparent supply chains for seafood.
Bad news is how to sell these high tech value-added seafood to end markets? Which markets do these products fit and how much price customers willing to pay for it?
Is There Hope?
I do not want to be pessimistic, and I genuinely believe the future of the seafood needs to be sustainable and transparent but to be honest, the world is going on recession where everybody wants to keep their money on their pockets. Therefore, with those problems ahead, where should we focus on our businesses? Focusing on a smaller market where traceable seafood make profits or solving world cheap protein problems using innovative technologies with sustainability?
To go deeper, I should tell it is not in our hands (producers) to provide cheaper protein solutions to plates. Taxes, custom rates, markups, shipping costs, intermediaries raise the prices. Every country has different custom tax regulations which are 37.5 for seafood imports in Turkey; additionally, some seafood products have fixed costs even if they have lower prices in invoices. It is so amusing that governments allow you to raise market rates, but you can’t go lower unless you agree to put away your profit.
So after all, how we can decide where seafood future is going and what we need? We all want to use technology for our benefits, okay but inside the free market economy, companies will be always focus on those profitable small markets whereas the priority should before safer and cheaper seafood on our plates need more visionary business owners and supportive governments.
