Hanoi - Vietnamese fishing authorities are angry over French
television reports and websites alleging that Vietnamese catfish,
known in Europe as pangassius or panga, are contaminated with
pollution, antibiotics or hormones, an official at the Vietnamese
Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) said Monday.
Two televised reports critical of the Vietnamese pangassius
farming industry have been picked up widely by French food and health
websites. VASEP says the television reports and websites fabricate
food safety issues in order to keep Vietnamese imports out of French
markets.
'In a battle to win market share, many people will slander each
other,' said Nguyen Huu Dung, deputy chairman of VASEP. 'These
websites are just reporting wrong ideas.'
European environmental and food safety organizations largely say
concerns over the safety of pangassius imports in Europe are
misplaced. They say the fish are safe to eat but that more needs to
be done to address the environmental sustainability of the industry.
'The European Union has a very good system for checking the
quality of imported products,' said Flavio Corsin, an aquaculture
advisor at the environmentalist organization WWF who works on the
Vietnamese pangassius industry. 'I'm Italian, and when I go to Italy,
I eat pangassius, because I know where it's coming from and I know
that the process of checking it is good.'
The French reports include 'Saga of the Panga,' broadcast in 2007
on the television channel France 2, and 'What is a Panga?', broadcast
on the cable channel M6. They focus on water pollution in the Mekong
Delta, where the pangassius farming industry is concentrated,
and on the use of antibiotics, and also note that the method for
breeding the fish involves the use of a hormone isolated from the
urine of pregnant women to stimulate females to produce eggs.
The reports provide no data for comparing pollution in the Mekong
to that in European fisheries. While hormones are used on a few
breeder females to stimulate egg production, they are not used in
raising the fish who are harvested, and are thus not present in
filets sold in supermarkets.
Corsin said antibiotics were no longer a problem in pangassius
shipments to Europe, and that while Vietnamese fish sometimes failed
EU safety inspections, fish harvested within the European Union
sometimes failed as well.
WWF is leading negotiations between Vietnamese producers and
European importers to establish certification procedures for
sustainable pangassius farming. The standards would address issues
such as biodiversity, chemicals and antibiotics, and social
responsibility.
Commenters on the French websites worried about the provenance of
an unfamiliar fish which only appeared in the European market within
the last five years, and were anxious over issues such as
globalization and chemicals.
But Vietnamese officials took the reports as an attempt to block
the inroads made by Vietnamese fish on the French market.
A report in the newspaper Dau Tu on Monday quoted Truong Dinh Hoe,
VASEP's general secretary, calling the reports 'an organized
slanderous program aiming at damaging the prestige of Vietnamese tra
and basa [pangassius] fish on the international market.'
Vietnam had no significant pangassius exports to the European
Union before 2003. In 2007, Vietnam exported 3.75 billion dollars
worth of seafood, including some 1.5 million tons of pangassius, with
half of those exports going to the EU.
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