Thank you very much for asking us to appear before you today to talk about seafood mislabelling, how it impacts Canada and the world, and what we can do to address it.
Oceana Canada, for anyone who doesn't know, is an independent charity. We're part of the largest international advocacy group focused solely on ocean conservation. We have offices across the Americas, in the EU and in Asia. We believe that Canada has a national and a global obligation to rebuild depleted fisheries and ensure a sustainable source of protein for the world's growing population.
As for the issue today, we've been investigating the prevalence of seafood fraud and species substitutions since 2017 in Canada, and internationally since 2011. We have dedicated campaigns on this issue in the U.S., the EU, Mexico and Brazil. Seafood fraud or mislabelling is really any activity that misrepresents the product being sold, including swapping a cheaper, less desirable or more readily available species for one that is more expensive, and substituting farmed products for wild-caught ones, or black market fish for legally caught varieties. It undermines food safety; it cheats consumers and the Canadian fishing industry; and it weakens the sustainability of fish populations. It can even mask global human rights abuses by creating a market for illegally caught fish.
When one fish is substituted for another, consumers risk exposure to allergens, parasites, environmental chemicals, aquaculture drugs or natural toxins found in some species of fish. Cheap or more readily available species are mislabelled so that they can be sold as expensive, desirable or supply limited ones. Not only do consumers get cheated out of what they paid for, but responsible, honest businesses also face unfair market competition. It harms our oceans by disguising threatened and endangered species and allowing illegally caught fish into the market. This undermines efforts to stop overfishing and to manage our fisheries sustainably.
Unfortunately, it's very common here in Canada and around the world. A 2016 review by Oceana of more than 200 published studies, from 55 countries, found that one in five of more than 25,000 samples was mislabelled. More recently in Canada, in 2017 and 2018, we collected seafood samples from restaurants and retailers in five Canadian cities and found that an alarming 44% of samples were mislabelled. This is consistent with other studies that have taken place in Canada. For example, the University of Guelph, with Dr. Bob Hanner, found that up to 41% of samples were mislabelled, and again, in 2018, the University of British Columbia found that 25% were mislabelled.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency's own research found that 15% of mislabelling happened before seafood products even reached the processing stage. Canada produces high quality seafood, however we export roughly 85% of this, and about 80% of what we eat here in Canada is imported from overseas. Seafood is traded globally, more than any other food. The supply chains are long, complex and quite obscure, and they often cross many national borders, sometimes going back and forth across the same border, which allows for many opportunities for mislabelling and illegal activity to be introduced along the way.
The best way to combat this is with full chain traceability, requiring that key information be paired with the fish product along the entire supply chain, from the point of capture or harvest to the point of sale. This approach has been implemented in the EU, which is the largest importer of seafood in the world, and the rate of mislabelling has dropped. The U.S. also recently implemented boat-to-border traceability for species that are at the highest risk of fraud.
That's the context in Canada. My colleague, Kim, is going to share recommendations for how we can address this more specifically in Canada.