'We tested 13 samples, only two of them were snapper'
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When it comes to seafood, nearly half of what you think you’re buying at the grocery store or ordering from a menu is falling short of its promises, according to a new DNA testing study by Oceana Canada. The ocean conservation group tested seafood samples from restaurants and grocery stores in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, and found that 46 per cent were mislabelled.
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Seafood is one of the most highly traded products in the world with a lengthy and complex supply chain. In Canada, upwards of 80 per cent of seafood is imported, and most of what we produce is exported. The opacity of the global industry is one of the main reasons seafood is so prone to fraud and mislabelling. There are a multitude of species coming from all over the world, and mislabelling happens throughout the supply chain.
Mislabelling rates are higher among restaurants than retailers, the report found: 6.5 per cent at stores versus 65 per cent in food service. This is consistent with other studies, explains Sayara Thurston, seafood fraud campaigner at Oceana Canada. Large retailers tend to have more control over their supply chains and the purchasing power to set their own requirements. But even the highly attuned eye is unlikely to pick up on species substitution and mislabelling. Retailers, restaurateurs and consumers are all victims of seafood fraud.
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“A restaurant owner could be doing everything right, and if fraud has happened further back in the supply chain without traceability, they have no way of knowing that,” says Thurston. “Once the fish is processed and you have two fillets in front of you, even if you’re an expert it can be almost impossible to tell, which is another factor that makes seafood a higher risk product.”
The mislabelling rate has dropped by just one percentage point since Oceana Canada’s analysis of 472 samples between 2017 and 2019: 47 per cent versus 46 per cent (43 out of 94) in spring 2021. In 2019, the government announced a “boat-to-plate” traceability program, which has yet to be implemented — making the stagnant results unsurprising, says Thurston.
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Traceability is hard, but it's not impossible
She points to the European Union as the “gold standard”: The EU implemented a catch certification system, boat-to-plate traceability and detailed labelling for all wild-caught fish in 2010. The United States developed a catch documentation scheme in 2018 and Japan recently passed legislation to prevent illegal seafood products from entering the market.
“It’s something that needs to be put in place to be effective, and we see other countries have been successful at doing it,” says Thurston. “That highlights the fact that this is something that can be done, because we have fishers here in Canada who are compliant with these systems. Traceability is hard, but it’s not impossible. We know it can be done and we need to put it in place here in Canada, both for consumers, but also for our industries as well.”
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Prof. Robert Hanner, who runs the University of Guelph’s Hanner Lab, which generated the data for Oceana’s Seafood Fraud in Canada: 2021 Testing Results Report, specializes in using genetic methods to identify species and has spent more than a decade studying seafood fraud.
Hanner previously partnered with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) on a landmark study published in Food Research International in 2019, which identified mislabelling throughout the supply chain at a rate of 32 per cent.
In a report released in March 2021, the CFIA said eight per cent of the seafood it had sampled from grocery stores, importers and domestic processors over the past two years was mislabelled. The findings of the new Oceana Canada report, however, are in line with other international studies such as the Guardian Seascape analysis, which found a mislabelling rate of 36 per cent, and others in Canada — including Hanner’s — ranging from 25 to 55 per cent.
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Hanner highlights that while it’s a significant issue in fish, fraud touches all aspects of the food supply chain: “Whenever you see supply chains being interrupted, or margins being squeezed, then there’s going to be a greater incentive to cheat.”
Seafood may be far from the only food prone to fraud — honey, avocado oil and olive oil are several other recent, high-profile examples — but it’s an important place to start tackling the issue for economic, environmental and health reasons, adds Hanner. “It cheats consumers, but it also cheats our legitimate suppliers out of their market share. Environmentally, we see this kind of mislabelling aids and abets the illegal, unregulated and unreported harvesting of seafood, which impacts sustainability. And perhaps most importantly to consumers, the potential human health risks around this.”
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Of the 13 snapper samples Oceana Canada tested, only two were actually snapper and seven were much more inexpensive tilapia. They also found 10 instances of escolar labelled as butterfish or tuna. Dubbed the laxative of the sea, “escolar is not a species that you want to be eating without knowing because it can cause fairly serious digestive issues,” says Thurston.
While Oceana Canada included six recommendations for the federal government in its report, including committing to a timeline for boat-to-plate traceability, Thurston also highlights the need for labelling improvements. In Canada, common rather than scientific names appear on labels, which can be misleading as dozens of species could fall under a single common name.
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According to the CFIA’s fish list, more than 20 different species could be sold as sole, for example. In the course of previous research, Hanner and his team encountered only a few of those sanctioned species in the marketplace, and many imposters. As consumers, we’re collectively eating our way through the food chain, he says. Fish sharing similar qualities to sole — such as flaky, white flesh — might be added to the list due to changes in fish stocks or prices. “The use of common names exacerbates the problem of seafood mislabelling and makes it more challenging to deal with because it’s not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a common name and a particular species.”
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Additionally, point of origin is not required on seafood labelling, but the last place of processing is. You might buy a piece of fish labelled as a product of the United States, but it could have been caught in Southeast Asia or off the coast of West Africa. Seafood typically travels to multiple countries before it hits grocery store shelves, Thurston says, “so you really have no way of knowing exactly what you’re eating, or exactly where it came from, even if it’s correctly labelled.”
Not all mislabelling is fraud, Hanner underscores, and some of this confusion could be cleared up by “modernizing our seafood list”: including the species, region of harvest and method of harvest, as the EU has done. “The Europeans have updated their policy framework to include scientific names, and to do public awareness and enforcement of seafood fraud, and the rates have been coming down. So that suggests it’s a solvable problem.”
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As part of the new report, Oceana Canada surveyed 1,500 Canadians in April 2021 on attitudes towards seafood traceability. The results suggest that Canadians are increasingly concerned about buying mislabelled seafood (87 per cent up from 76 per cent in 2020) as well as the government’s lack of action (86 per cent).
“It shouldn’t be up to the consumer to be an expert in figuring out if a product is genuine or not. There are steps that consumers can take to protect themselves to lower their risk of being a victim of seafood fraud (such as buying whole fish rather than fillets and sourcing seafood locally), but this is something that needs a government solution,” says Thurston. “If you can’t trust what’s written on the label, then what can you trust? Nobody wants to feel unsure about, or unsafe about something that they’re buying.”
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Think you're buying snapper? Not so fast. New report finds nearly half of seafood samples mislabelled - National Post
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