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The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has published its September 2022 Food Fraud Monthly Summary reporting food fraud incidents and investigations from around the world. These have been kindly represented as an infographic above by our Member Bruno Séchet, and thanks for allowing us to share it with the rest of the Network.

Included in this September Summary, there is also a link to a report about the EU controls on illegal fishing, and how they are weakened by uneven checks and sanctions by Member States.

You can download the full Food Fraud Summary here  

Wild-caught seafood is vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, which often leads to overfishing and destruction of marine environments. A recent study has developed a method to determine the geographical origin of seafood using oxygen isotope (δ¹⁸O) composition imprinted in the shells and bones of seafood (δ¹⁸O_biomin). This value is determined by ocean composition and temperature rather than the seafood's biology.  Global ocean isoscapes of predicted δ¹⁸O_biomin values specific to fish (otoliths), cephalopod (statoliths) and shellfish (shells), and a fourth combined “universal” isoscape, were evaluated in their ability to derive δ¹⁸O_biomin values among known-origin samples. After validation and testing of the method, it was  demonstrated that this global isoscape can be used to correctly identify the origins of a wide range of marine animals living in different latitudes. After removing tuna species from the analyses, a prediction rate of up to 90% in classifying fish, cephalopods, and shellfish between the tropical waters of Southeast Asia and the cooler waters of southern Australia was obtained. Further research is planned to incorporate other chemical markers into improving the prediction of geographical origin. 

Read the full open access paper and the corresponding article here

The global seafood supply chain handles an enormous volume of products, half of which is caught wild, and there is also widespread illegal fishing feeding into this supply chain. It is one of the most fragmented food supply chains, and transparency into its actors and the movement of products has been notoriously elusive and difficult to manage. There is now increasing pressure from consumers, retailers, government and watchdog organisations to improve transparency. This article discusses the problems of having a fragmented supply chain, and the pressures of improving it, and the consequences of not doing so.

Read the full article