April 10, 2008

Indonesia to strengthen seafood trade position

Indonesia will strengthen its seafood trade position with consumer countries by building on a strategic regional alliance, according to a Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry official on Monday.

Quality monitoring programs implemented through the Asian Shrimp Alliance (ASA), which was established last year, would be modified, said Made L Nurdjana, director general of aquaculture at the ministry.

The ASA was chosen as a focus because shrimp had become the most popular fishery commodity in most consumer countries, especially the EU, the US and Japan, with Indonesia exporting 4.5 million tonnes of fishery products to those countries.

Indonesia's shrimp sales value is worth more than US$1.3 billion, equivalent to about 50 percent of the country's total fishery export, which was worth US$2.3 billion last year.

About 113 Indonesian fishery product exporters are complying with food standard regulations and ASA members would uniform food standards across all countries and improve lobbying of consumer countries.

Some members suggested that consumer countries should help to finance research and development programs in exporting countries, and Nurdjana agreed with the idea, citing that it is only fair when it is the consumer countries that would ultimately benefit from the products.

The alliance has to be strengthened as products are often rejected due to food safety and internal screening processing issues, even if the exporter and country had complied with the processes, according to Achmad Poernomo, director of fishery product management.

Food safety agencies in some EU member states have ordered imported fishery products to undergo screening even if they had food safety certificates, citing concerns of antibiotic contamination.

The test costs about EUR 4,000 per container, which is costly for most exporters, said Poernomo.

Poernomo is expecting the consumer countries to see the results of the modified quality monitoring system soon, and hopes that they would come to trust in it so that exported Indonesian products could avoid the costly screening test.