Around one in five fish and seafood items sold around the world could be fake in some way, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which says shady practices such as false labelling and passing off vegetable-based products as the real thing are “widespread.”
“There is no official estimate of how prevalent fraud is in the $195 billion global fisheries and aquaculture sector, but empirical studies suggest that 20% of the trade may be subject to some type of fraud,” the FAO explained in a February statement, warning that when it comes to dining out, the risk could be more like 30%.
“Fraud is especially prevalent in restaurants and catering services, where visual identification is challenging, and in processed products, where the species identity can be masked,” the FAO explained in a new report setting out the colossal scale of the problem.
“Economic incentives are the most widespread driver of fish fraud,” the FAO explained, pointing out that selling Atlantic salmon as Pacific salmon “delivers a nearly $10 benefit per kilogram” - as most Atlantic-branded salmon is farmed while the Pacific alternative is generally caught in the wild.
There are many categories of fraud, the FAO said, mentioning what it calls adulteration - such as when colouring is added to make fish such as tuna look fresher.
Another practice is counterfeiting, such as making imitation shrimp from starch-based compounds, while simulation refers to deceptions such as packaging surimi to make it seem like crab meat.
And then there is straight-up species substitution, such as when cheaper and milder-tasting tilapia is sold in restaurants as the more expensive and sought-after red snapper.
“The global scale of fish consumption, targeting over 12,000 seafood species, the diversity of fraud types, and the lack of standardized regulatory or legal definitions of fraud, make global estimations difficult to obtain,” the FAO said, explaining that the level of seafood fraud far exceeds that seen in meat or fruit or vegetables.
The disparity is “largely due to the vast diversity of species in the sector,” the FAO asserted. – dpa
