Fish Standards

Posted - May 1, 2008

Organic Fish: Standards May Vary

By Adrian Larose - as printed in O.W.N. Summer 2008

Contrast the isolation of one Peruvian fish farm currently producing organic trout with the debates around the regulatory definition of organic seafood, and you have some idea of the confusion now swirling through organic aquaculture.

Peru’s BioTrucha raises, harvests and processes its own organic fish in Andina, a town on Lake Arapa. The 19 families of the Asociación de Productorres de Trucha Ecológica Bio-Trucha Andina Peru have been producing certified organic trout since 2005 in canned, vacuum-packed and smoked forms.

Organic fish forms about 30% of the co-op’s total production. Production manager Wilfredo L. Vasquez Quispesivana said this ratio is likely to shift towards more organic over time.

Yet what “organic” means in the case of fish (and other seafood) remains complex. Quispesivana said he is often asked how BioTrucha obtained organic certification for fish. Its products are certified by BioLatina, an agency approved to EU and USDA standards. Yet such standards do not yet exist for fish, leaving definitions to the certifiers.

“This is the first canned certified organic fish to hit the Australian market,” says Antonio Ramos of his firm Olive Green Organics’ decision to import BioTrucha’s canned trout as a private-labelled variety. Advantages Ramos identified include relatively low cost, traceability and nutritional properties.

Importing direct from the producer-processor, BioTrucha, should “give consumers assurance that they are eating a clean product that is fully traceable,” Ramos said. A single organization in a single town raises, harvests and processes the fish. The compact Peruvian operation also makes the price attractive, compared to other specialty fish. The few such offerings now available in Australia are quite expensive, Ramos says. Nutritionally, BioTrucha’s trout is very high in omega-3 and omega-6 fats. It contains no heavy metals, including mercury, Ramos said, good news for Australian consumers.

While companies like BioTrucha are already offering such healthy fish, neither the European Union nor the United States has passed a regulatory definition of organic seafood. Both are developing such standards, with EU implementation scheduled for 2009.

Standards/Certifiers

Until now, certification agencies have been certifying organic seafood based on their own standards. The WWF recently studied more than 20 private aquaculture certifiers, 10 of which certify organic products.

It gave most organic certifiers good marks. “Generally, organic aquaculture standards performed better in the benchmarking exercise than their conventional counterparts, indicating that today’s organic aquaculture standards do address the defined criteria to a greater extent,” the report reads.

That leaves Stefan Bergleiter , aquaculture expert with the Naturland certification organization, wondering how much coming EU and US regulations will affect private certifiers. Establishing rules will certainly bring diverse private standards closer together, but some private standards - such as Naturland’s - also include detailed social and environmental criteria. “We certainly would not expect the EU regulation to really address these issues, at least not in detail,” Bergleiter said.

The legislated standards must address some controversial topics. What types of fish meal to allow is a major debate. In fish farming, “it looks like it’s not possible to do completely without fish meal,” Bergleiter said. “In conventional aquaculture, you can replace animal protein by plant protein and then substitute amino acids that are absent in the plant protein.” Such synthetics are banned from organic operations.

“Certified organic seafood is still only a tiny percentage of seafood,” Bergleiter said. “It’s far less than one per cent.” If broad standards develop sensibly with input from certifiers like Naturland and groups like the WWF, perhaps that can change as consumers feel more confident - and less confused - about organic seafood.