Quote:
Australia's appetite for fish and chips is being fed by Pacific dory,
aka Mekong River catfish, which is set to dwarf our local fishing industry.
Fish and chips, a wedge of lemon, lashings of batter and salt – a splash
of vinegar to dilute the grease, perhaps – and all washed down with a
soft drink, a frosty ale or a glass of vino.
December, the start of the long, hot summer. Bring on the lazy weekends
and coastal holidays. Forget slaving over a hot stove or a barbecue:
dinner is served, at the beach, in cardboard cartons, or parcelled up in
newsprint lined with greaseproof paper.
But something is missing, and it’s not the seagulls or the flies. The
good, fresh, local catch that Australians have for generations
associated with their fish and chips – the flathead, snapper, silver and
john dory, red fish, bream and whiting – are in increasingly short
supply and, as a result, are becoming prohibitively expensive.
In their place in the fish-and-chips pack, like it or not, is "Pacific
dory", the so-called "catch of the day" – an innocuous skinless,
boneless and bland-flavoured fillet.
Pacific dory is now Australia’s biggest-selling fish, according to the
Master Fish Merchants Association (MFMA). With sales approaching a
staggering 7000 tonnes this year, it is driving a fish shop revolution.
Says MFMA chief executive, Michael Kitchener: "Because it is relatively
cheap, retailing at around $10 per kilogram, the public love it."
The problem, according to the chairman of the Australian Fish Names
Committee, Roy Palmer, is that Pacific dory has never seen the Pacific –
or any other ocean, for that matter. And it is nothing like a dory.
Here’s food for thought: the fish you will probably sink your teeth into
the next time you are beachside and hungry has been raised in cages
suspended under houseboats and barges in the crowded and polluted waters
of Vietnam’s Mekong River.
The same snap-frozen and imported fish, says Palmer, is being sold as a
popular line in Australian supermarkets under the deceptive marketing
label, "freshwater fillet".
It is Pangasius bocourti, one of 21 species of freshwater catfish found
in the Mekong basin, and – in a move designed to curb deceptive naming
practices by fishmongers and supermarkets – last year christened "basa"
under Seafood Services Australia’s uniform fish names process.
"Basa’s success in the marketplace has been a key factor in fish imports
from Vietnam doubling in 2002-03 and then doubling again last year,"
says managing director of the Sydney Fish Market, Grahame Turk.
An estimated 300,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese are involved in the
government-owned basa fishery. It produces more basa than Australia’s
total seafood production of 550,000 tonnes a year, according to Turk,
who is also deputy chairman of the Australian Seafood Industry Council.
Vietnam’s basa production, Turk says, is expected to reach 1 million
tonnes a year within five years. Vietnam’s catfish exports have already
decimated the local catfish industry in the US where producers are
fighting back.
There is no basa-farming standard among Vietnamese processors, according
to the American domestic fishing lobby, thus there is no distinction in
the marketplace between professionally farmed product and caged fish
from Mekong houseboats and barges.
Sewage systems along the Mekong struggle to keep pace with rapid
development, and run-off from the river’s hinterland is polluted by
fertilisers and pesticides.
American industry sources claim large stocks of basa are fed through
holes cut in the floors of houseboats, the human waste from which also
goes straight into the river. Food for the fish includes vegetable and
crop waste, rice bran and animal waste.
The Mekong and associated aquaculture ponds have a high silt
concentration, say the Americans, and it is common Vietnamese practice
to soak the basa fillets in sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP), a chemical
used as a preservative and seafood "texturiser".
This means that consumers who purchase basa by weight from Australian
supermarkets need to be wary, because fish treated with STPP retain more
water.
In August, the American states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana
suspended the sale of all Vietnamese aquatic products, following the
discovery of the antibiotics ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin in basa imports.
Ciprofoxacin and enrofloxacin – prohibited in western countries because
of the risk of their transferring resistant micro-organisms to humans –
were being used by some Mekong River basa producers to combat salmonella
and other disease in fish.
The antibiotics can also lead to the development of the infectious
disease campylobacter, which can cause diarrhoea, abdominal pain, fever,
nausea and vomiting. Vietnam’s Ministry of Fisheries has foreshadowed
restrictions on the use of 11 antibiotics in its aquatic products
sector. The use of the name basa in place of Pacific dory is not yet
mandatory in Australia, says Roy Palmer, "even though there are a lot of
reasons why it should be".
An Australian standard for fish names is expected to be launched early
in the new year, as a preliminary step towards legislative controls.
"One of the problems is that every state has different arrangements,"
Palmer says. "Until there is uniformity, people can drive holes through
these issues.
"And the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service [charged with
responsibility for making sure imports meet Australian food standards]
does not check fish names. This remains a big problem."
To quote WK "well bugger me with the rag mans bugle" I didn't know that.
