A new federal plan to combat seafood fraud by requiring the fishing industry to trace their catches from boat or farm to the U.S. border has survived a court challenge.
The Seafood Traceability Rule surfaced during President Barack Obama’s final days in office and is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2018. For the…
Representative Blake Farenthold, R-TX, has reintroduced a bill intended to cut down on seafood fraud and protect American fishermen. He says his Protecting Honest Fishermen Act would level the playing field for Americans who play by the rules and have to compete with foreign fishing operations that mislabel products.
Farenthold was joined in the introduction…
In the 1990s, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used proteins to identify seafood, but the profiling method could only match to a standard sample. They had to have frozen tissues from all of the species they wanted to compare and the agency did have a collection to work with, but no matter how…
The Chesapeake Bay’s iconic blue crab is said to carry a distinctly fresh taste that’s prized by locals and tourists alike. But the crab cakes sold as authentically local at some restaurants in the Chesapeake region might actually be fraudulent crab shipped from as far away as Indonesia, according to a new study by Oceana…
The Presidential Task Force on Combating Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing and Seafood Fraud has released its final action plan for implementing the 15 recommendations issued in December. The plan, unveiled Sunday at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston, includes measures to create and expand domestic partnerships to detect black market fishing and…
Seafood safety, legal fishing, and proper labeling of fish might all benefit from presidential task force recommendations now open to public comments. Scheduled for publication on Dec. 18 in the Federal Register, the “Recommendations of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing and Seafood Fraud” cover four general themes:
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Unsure whether the congressional spending package referred to by many in Washington, D.C., as the “cromnibus” had enough votes to pass, House GOP leaders delayed a final vote Thursday afternoon, but, after 9 p.m., they managed to pass the bill 219-206. In order to keep the government from shutting down while the Senate debates the …
Earlier this summer, the White House established a Presidential Task Force on Combating Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing and Seafood Fraud and requested comments from the public to help inform and advise the task force in developing recommendations for the president. “Seafood fraud” refers to any action that misrepresents or mischaracterizes seafood in the supply…
Early this year, the discovery that horsemeat was being substituted for beef in some European foods triggered widespread concern over food fraud in the EU. This substitution, deemed the “horsemeat scandal,” was eventually determined to be affecting around 5 percent of European beef products. But in the U.S., consumers have a different type of fraud…
U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA.) on Wednesday re-introduced a new, bipartisan version of a previously-introduced bill to combat widespread seafood fraud “that cheats fishermen and consumers, while posing health risks to pregnant mothers and others,” according to Markey. The bill comes on the heels of recent studies that found, on average, 33 percent of the…
A new study has found that over one-third of the fish carried by New York City grocery stores and restaurants are falsely labeled. These findings, published last week by ocean advocacy group Oceana, add New York to a growing list of major cities in which widespread seafood fraud has been discovered through DNA testing.…
