Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First, I would like to thank the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for inviting me to participate as a witness in this session. I'm here as a coordinator of two EU projects, Labelfish and Seatraces, which were funded by the EU Interreg Atlantic program here in Europe, and these two projects were related to seafood labelling and traceability.
I work with the Spanish National Research Council, which has different research institutes devoted to the ocean and its resources. In the case of my institute, which is the Marine Research Institute in Vigo here in Spain, we have been working on seafood fraud for more than 30 years and, in particular, we have been developing analytical tools for fighting seafood fraud. Obviously, this work has been done in collaboration with other European research institutions, and I'm not going to mention all of them. What I have to say is that during all these years we have analyzed many seafood commercial samples, the different processing levels, and we have been looking for mislabelling and, in particular, for species misrepresentation. Although we didn't conduct market studies that are properly considered statistical, we have observed that seafood fraud at retailers both in Spain and Europe has been decreasing over time since the 1990s when we started to work on this topic.
We think that the following reasons may explain the decrease. We think that the development of analytical tools to authenticate seafood and the fact that this method is easy to implement for a reasonable price have been supporting this decrease. We also think that consumer and industry awareness about the impact of seafood fraud has contributed to the decrease in fraud. Finally, of course, the enforcement and control by authorities that has been put in place in Europe during these years is also a significant reason for this decrease.
However, we have identified some aspects that need further attention and that we were focusing on in our recent projects, Labelfish and Seatraces. I'm going to name them quickly. We think there's a lack of harmonization and standardization of the current methods to control for misrepresentation, especially of species and geographic origin. Even though there has been a lot of effort to develop these methods and build the databases, we think there isn't enough coordination for the purpose of harmonization and standardization.
Also, we think that developing fast and easy-to-perform analytical tools for some of the main issues with seafood misrepresentation, such as species, geographic origin or populations, are needed. Also, there is other information that is required by European law, such as the declaration of the presence of water or declaration of aqueous solutions in some seafood products, or not declaring some processes, such as freezing, or even tools for differentiation of wild versus farmed seafood.
We think another important aspect to be addressed is increasing the population's awareness of the impact of labelling and traceability on fisheries' sustainability. Also, the impact that the application of these two tools has on decreasing IUU fisheries damage is another important aspect that we think should addressed.
Developing digital tools for helping stakeholders like fishermen and industry to implement food chain traceability in the seafood sector is also an important aspect to consider.
Finally, there's improving co-operation among different government agencies and, especially in the case of Europe, different countries—we are a number of countries with the same regulation and think we should collaborate on this, but this can be extended to other parts of the world—to exchange information about new types of fraud incidents and the types and specific analytical tools to be used for fighting this fraud.
Thank you for your attention. I will be open to questions from you.
Thanks.