Fraud in the food trade is a serious problem and fish are among the foods where the most fraud seems to occur. Matís held a seminar where food fraud was discussed from various angles, and among other things examined how genetic engineering can be used to promote greater integrity.
Matís is one of 38 participants in a large pan-European project, Food Integrity, which aims to detect food fraud and develop preventive methods. The project has been allocated a total of EUR 12 million and Matís' share is in trade in seafood.
Palm oil and melamine
Jón Árnason, project manager at Matís, gave a talk at the conference where he discussed how to monitor and verify the content of feed in aquaculture. He says problems with aquaculture feed are fortunately rare, but still need to be addressed. Consumers are also increasingly demanding to know a lot about the origin of all the food they eat. "Consumers not only look at the quality and the price, but also where the food comes from and what it contains. This makes it even more important for aquaculture companies to be able to trace with certainty all the raw materials used for aquaculture. "
Jón mentions some examples, such as the controversy that arose in the discussion about Norwegian salmon farming a year ago. "There was a lot of discussion about the use of palm oil in fish feed due to the way palm oil is produced in many parts of the world. Farmers are destroying wild jungle to pay for palm farming, and this is affecting the ecosystem in those areas. "
Jón also mentions the uproar that took place in Europe at the time when it was discovered that the producer had mixed meat and bone meal with traditional fish meal. "This was when the fear of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was at its height and led to the European Union severely restricting the use of fishmeal for a while."
Jón even says that it is possible that producers could start adding melamine to aquaculture feed to create misleading results about nutritional content. "It is an inorganic compound of nitrogen that is not useful as a nutrient and can even act as a toxin, but if an analysis were made of the nitrogen content of melamine-mixed feed, it would indicate that the protein content was higher than it actually is."
What can you do then? Jón says the only way to ensure integrity is to promote a high-quality flow of information down the entire value chain. Another way is to use international standards and chairs for official supervision. "The Aquaculture Stewardship Council and various other standards seek to certify processes and quality down the entire value chain."
The third way is to use genetic engineering and let the feed samples tell the story. "If there is a suspicion that there is a raw material in the feed that should not be there, then a genetic test can determine whether this is the case. Even in the form of flour, it is possible to identify what has gone into the feed, such as what plant and animal species are found there.
The above-mentioned news / interview is published in Morgunblaðið and on www.mbl.is March 17 / ai@mbl.is.
Further information is provided by Jón Árnason at Matís.