Vietnam Archives - Page 3 of 5

New government rules threaten Vietnam’s tuna sector

March 7, 2019 — Tuna importers and exporters in Vietnam are complaining that their business operations have been severely impacted due to new requirements from the country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according to statements from Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP).

There are two circulars from the ministry that are now affecting both importers and exporters of tuna, VASEP said.

On 25 December, 2018, the ministry issued a revised circular, effective 10 February this year, which stated that consignments imported from ships at the oceans via transit ports in other countries must now submit a certification document or they will not be cleared. The document must include name of the ships, their registration numbers, their flag states, names and volumes of the catches, unloading time and location, and preservation conditions. The document, provided by authorities at the transit ports, must also certify that the catches are kept as at their original state and have not been under any processing phases.

VASEP, however, said most of the countries and territories through which VASEP members import their tuna refuse to provide such a document. Only Thailand and the Philippines had agreed to begin providing the certification, but even their documents do not contain all information required by Vietnamese authorities, VASEP said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

China tackling tax evasion in seafood sector on many fronts

February 15, 2019 — Chinese authorities are touting their latest prize in an intensification of their ongoing crackdown in illegal seafood-related operations.

The arrest of a smuggling gang accused of bringing CNY 2.6 billion (USD 385.5 million, EUR 340.3 million) worth of frozen seafood clandestinely across the border from Vietnam over a three-year period was announced in prime-time coverage across regional and national television channels in January.

Customs and police forces from across southern China collaborated on the prosecution of the gang. The investigators hailed the operation as a triumph in protecting food safety and fair tax collection for the Chinese people. Those arrested include the CEO of a major processing and distribution firm in Dalian, who could face a trial that will set an example for the industry.

In another high-profile bust, a gang of 55 suspects were arrested in August 2018 for allegedly controlling the marine fishing sector in the port city of Weifang. The gang “occupied by force” the sea space in the outlying Shouguang and Changyi counties and forced fishing and aquaculture companies to pay for access to the water, according to an indictment published by the local Public Security Bureau (PSB), China’s police force. The gang also “taxed” the vessels according to the volume of their catch.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

China tackling tax evasion in seafood sector on many fronts

February 11, 2019 — Chinese authorities are touting their latest prize in an intensification of their ongoing crackdown in illegal seafood-related operations.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Thousands of pounds of Vietnamese catfish recalled

February 7, 2019 — A United States importer is recalling more than 55,000 pounds of catfish from Vietnam.

City of Industry, California-based Richwell Group, Inc. – doing business as Maxfield Seafood – is recalling around 55,300 pounds of frozen Sheat catfish products that were not presented for import re-inspection into the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) said in a press release.

The catfish products, imported from Vietnam on various dates from April 2018, through December 2018, were distributed to retailers nationwide.

The recalled products include Maxfield Seafood SHEAT FISH CA TREN KET and 14-ounce clear bag packages labeled Maxfield Seafood SHEAT FISH CA TREN RANG.

The problem was discovered on 30 January, 2019, during FSIS surveillance activities of imported products at the distributor’s facility, FSIS said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

SFP: Farmed shrimp has significant sustainability concerns

December 14, 2018 — A new report released by the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership on 12 December indicates that the world’s farmed shrimp production has lingering sustainability concerns with little improvement likely on the horizon.

The new report, which is a part of SFP’s “Target 75” initiative, classifies just 8.8 percent of the global production of farmed shrimp as “improving,” and none is classified as sustainable under the Target 75 standards. The major shrimp production regions that were assessed – China, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam – all have high chances of supply chain disruption and have significant sustainability concerns, according to SFP.

“The report highlights the need to work collaboratively across the supply chain to launch aquaculture improvement projects at the zonal scale and improve aquaculture governance,” Casey Marion of Beaver Street Fisheries said.

The biggest target for sustainability improvements, according to the report, are export-heavy markets that engage with countries more actively concerned about sustainability.

“This includes Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Together, these production regions account for 2.1 million metric tons, representing almost 42 percent of global production,” the report states.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Vietnam boosts tuna exports to US in October, thanks to trade war

December 7, 2018 — The tariff conflict between the United States and China has enabled Vietnam and other tuna exporters to increase shipments to the United States and this trend is expected to continue in the coming months, Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) said in a statement last week.

In October, Vietnam exported tuna worth USD 26 million (EUR 22.9 million) to the United States, soaring 35 percent from the same month in 2017 and up 36.8 percent month-on-month. The rise in October was reached following continuous declines in the previous months. And it was made when U.S. importers suspended cargoes from China due to higher duties, said VASEP.

The value of tuna exports from Vietnam to the United States in the first 10 months stood at USD 183 million (EUR 161.2 million), down nearly 3 percent from the same period last year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Vietnam poised to become top player in ocean aquaculture

August 9, 2018 — Vietnam has set an ambitious goal of becoming a leading country in aquaculture – specifically in the productive development of its coastal marine environment.

Currently ranked as the fourth-largest producer of seafood from aquaculture, behind China, Indonesia, and India, Vietnam produced 3.84 million metric tons (MT) of farmed seafood in 2017. That was more than 53 percent of Vietnam’s total seafood production of 7.23 MT, which itself represented an increase of 5.2 percent year-on-year over Vietnam’s total from 2016.

Vietnam’s government and industry stakeholders have recently taken a more serious interest in the development of Vietnam’s aquaculture sector, Tran Dinh Luan, the deputy director of Vietnam’s Fisheries General Department, told a workshop in Hanoi in early July.

The workshop, co-organized by the Vietnam Seaculture Association, Vietnam’s Fisheries Department, and the U.S. Soybean Export Council (USSEC), centered around Vietnam’s draft national strategy for marine aquaculture development through 2030. The strategy, with an addendum that proposes a vision through 2050, was prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and will be submitted to Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc for final approval.

The plan calls for the country to implement – on a trial basis – several policies designed to encourage industrial sea farming, particularly in offshore areas, by 2020. The plan aims to double the farmed output from the sea by 2020 to 750,000 MT total, comprising 200,000 MT of fish, 400,000 MT of mollusks and 150,000 MT of seaweed, according to the draft strategy.

Luan said while sea farming in Vietnam is still at its early stages of development, the strategy is designed to develop the whole production chain of the sector at larger and more advanced levels. In its latter stages of execution, the plan calls for production to rise to 1.75 million MT by 2030, and to three million MT by 2050.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Is trade war pushing seafood processing out of China?

August 3, 2018 —The current Sino-U.S. trade war, which has seen tariffs imposed on most seafood products from China (but not on re-exported processed product), is causing many seafood processing companies in China to reassess whether or not to move their operations out of China. This is the first of a two-part series looking into the issue.

Many seafood processing companies are now assessing whether to move to another Asian location where wages and costs are lower. Even before the trade war heated up between the United States and China, it was a well-known fact that the cost of doing business in China has been rising steadily for years. Today, the average Chinese worker’s wages are twice those in Vietnam.

There are plenty of takers for anyone moving processing activity out of China, starting with what Asia-focused advisors have begun to refer to as the new “Big 5” of Asian manufacturing competiveness. As listed in the Deloitte 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index, the Big 5 are: Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, and Vietnam.

All of those countries have committed to reforms that have improved their rankings, such as creating a national credit scoring system that allows for quick due-diligence checks on would-be local partners, and regulatory reforms that make it easier to wind up companies in those countries. Also, there’s been movement on better utilities connections in several ASEAN countries, including Indonesia. Vietnam has created a one-stop shop for business licenses and tax remittances while Malaysia has put much of the process online. And India and Thailand have worked hard to streamline their export and import licensing systems.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Technavio report: Global aquaculture market’s growth accelerating through 2022

July 23, 2018 — The global aquaculture market is experiencing robust growth, which is likely to accelerate through the year 2022, according to a report from the market research firm Technavio.

The report, “Global Aquaculture Market 2018-2022,” presents an analysis of the global aquaculture market based on end-users (commercial and residential); by product (freshwater fish, crustacean, mollusks, diadromous fish, and others); by environment (freshwater, marine water, and brackish water); by culture (net pen culture, floating-cage culture, pond culture, and rice field culture); by geography (the Americas, APAC, and EMEA); and by market, organized by distribution channel.

The report attributes aquaculture’s rising success to the world’s growing human population, its hunger for seafood, and the decline of the captured fish industry.

“Globalization, which has led to improved logistics systems and trade facilities, provides a favorable environment for the growth of the aquaculture market,” the report said. “The growth of the retail sector also drives the market.”

The report predicts a compound annual growth rate for the global aquaculture industry of 4.46 percent for the five-year period between 2018 and 2022. In 2018, the report predicts a CAGR of 3.72; a CAGR of 4.12 percent in 2019; 4.50 percent in 2020; 4.83 percent in 2021; and 5.15 percent in 2022.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

“Whitefish wars” driving Vietnam’s pangasius away from EU, US

February 7, 2018 — The rapid growth of Vietnam’s pangasius shipments has met with several markets barriers in the European Union and United States, where the fish is being gradually pushed away.

With similarity in texture and taste to other whitefish such as cod, sole, haddock, and pollock, but with much lower prices, pangasius from the Southeast Asia nation has quickly become a competitive alternative in the U.S. and E.U., Nguyen Tien Thong, an assistant professor of applied economics and marketing research at the University of Southern Denmark, told SeafoodSource.

But Thong, also a research associate with analytics firm Syntesa, with a specialty in price formation and consumer preference for seafood, said pangasius’ growth in the U.S. and E.U. markets has been actively thwarted by market barriers erected by both the industry’s competitors and erroneous reporting by mass media.

Vietnam’s pangasius exports were worth USD 1.78 billion (EUR 1.43 billion) last year, up 4.3 percent from 2016. But the export value to the U.S. and E.U. fell 11 percent and 22.3 percent, respectively, recently released data from Vietnam Association of Seafood Producers and Exporters (VASEP) revealed.

Three “wars” against pangasius

European and Vietnamese seafood experts have collectively created a new term for the campaigns surrounding pangasius, calling them the ”whitefish wars.”

The most recent round of this war broke out in early 2017, when a television segment on Spain’s Cuatro channel claimed pangasius farming was polluting the Mekong Delta. Two weeks later, French retail giant Carrefour decided to suspend sales of Vietnamese pangasius in all its stores in Belgium, France, and Spain. Carrefour attributed its decision to “the doubts that persist about the adverse impacts that pangasius farms have on the environment.”

The Aquaculture Stewardship Council responded to Carrefour’s move with a statement insisting the facts did not support Carrefour’s pangasius decision, and VASEP said repeatedly that the Cuatro report provided distorted information. Seeking to help combat the growing ”PR crisis,” 20 of Vietnam’s leading pangasius exporters joined together to create a market development fund in June 2017. But the rebuttals appeared largely ineffective at halting the negative impact on pangasius sales.

However, Thong argues that the “whitefish war” began as early as 2000, and started in the United States. In that year, about 90 percent of the catfish imported by the U.S. was from Vietnam. Feeling threatened, U.S. catfish growers and wholesalers started a campaign to curtail imports of Vietnamese pangasius into the country.

For years, pangasius faced high anti-dumping duties imposed by the U.S government, and a push for increased inspections. After a protracted political debate, in August 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) began inspecting all imported pangasius. Only a few months after the decision, only two of 14 Vietnamese pangasius exporters are still shipping pangasius to the U.S., according to VASEP.

In the E.U., backlash against pangasius started in late 2010, when the World Wildlife Fund placed the fish on the “red list,” effectively branding it a no-buy for environmentally conscientious consumers, Thong said. The attempt, which Thong termed as the second “war,” was made after the fish became a significant substitute fish to other whitefish raised in many European countries.

A few years later, WWF reversed course on pangasius, giving its backing to all Vietnamese-produced pangasius awarded Aquaculture Stewardship Council certification.

Further controversy was ignited in 2011 when Member of the European Parliament Struan Stevenson, senior vice president of the European Parliament’s Fisheries Committee, attacked the pangasius’ environmental, social, and safety credentials during an address to the European Parliament.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource