12 June 2016 - Business View Caribbean
Opening
Lines
develop the sector in keeping with the emerging
challenges.” The intensive two-week training course
recently held in Iceland served to help fill this knowl-
edge gap in the Caribbean.
Susan Singh-Renton, the CRFM’s deputy executive
director, noted, “The CRFM/UNU-FTP SPS Manage-
ment Course has been very successful in achieving
its objective of exposing CARIFORUM Fisheries
and Agricultural Health and Food Safety experts to
the key lessons and best practices of the Icelandic
fishing industry in producing safe and wholesome
fishery products of an international standard. At the
close of the course, participants reflected on and
also documented how they would apply what they
had learned to improve fisheries SPS management
in their home countries.”
Jeannette Mateo, Director of Fisheries Resources
at the Dominican Council for Fisheries and Aquacul-
ture (CODOPESCA) in the Dominican Republic, sug-
gested that nationals in her country, such as biolo-
gists, inspectors, fisheries officers, and consumer
protection agents, should be trained in basic con-
cepts of SPS.
For his part, Roberts hopes that the trainees will im-
mediately begin to impart what they have learned
to others in their national networks. Roberts fur-
thermore hopes that trainees will implement inter-
nationally recognized safety standards for seafood,
thereby safeguarding the health of the local popula-
tion while ensuring market access to meet global
market demands.
Singh-Renton said that the CRFM will also strive to
do its part to provide follow-up regional support for
improved SPS management for the region’s fishing
industries, including facilitating continued network-
ing among the course participants.
“One of the more frequent but often overlooked
problems within the Caribbean is food fraud and
mislabeling,” noted Dr. Wintorph Marsden, Senior
Veterinary Officer in Jamaica’s Ministry of Industry,
Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries. Marsden said
that Jamaica is considered a major transshipment
hub for fish and fishery products to the wider Carib-
bean region, and so the burden is on Jamaica, as a
first point of entry, to implement a system of verifi-
cation of products entering its food chain.
“To combat food fraud, it is an absolute necessity to
introduce traceability,” said Marsden. This can now
be done electronically, with modern systems of re-
cording, such as the use barcodes, radio-frequency
identification (RFID) tags and other tracking media
within the production chain.
In the Dominican Republic, Mateo’s job is to review
all the supporting documentation for seafood im-
ports and exports. She observed, though, “Some of
these documents might have statements to make
