In a surprise policy shift the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s Office of Seafood has ignored its own inspection data and refuses Chinese shrimp exports. According to FDAImports.com, LLC the US FDA will continue to prohibit most Chinese seafood firms from shipping certain products like shrimp and catfish to the United States, simply because it was “too cumbersome” for FDA to comply efficiently with its own rules or to apply its own recent Chinese inspection data to assess compliance with agency requirements.
Before August 2007, a Chinese seafood processor could ship seafood to the
U.S. for sale, as long as it had a good history and there was no evidence of a problem with that firm’s product. Suddenly, it became next to impossible to do so without greater expenses in testing and storage and delays.
Under this circumstances all shipments of Chinese shrimp and catfish were detained automatically, requiring importers to test the product to prove it was not contaminated with unapproved animal drugs. It is explained that those automatic Chinese seafood detentions cost money in terms of testing and storage and extensive delays, sometimes months at a time, before FDA would release the shipments one by one.
It was expected that a Chinese seafood processor can be exempted from the alert if the firm successfully shipped five clean shipments to the U.S. (proven clean by private
laboratory testing) and the firm submitted an inspection report conducted by an “appropriate” third party inspection company or government agency. But in the summer of 2008, and without any new grant of authority from Congress, FDA sent inspectors to China to audit AQSIQ — a Chinese agency similar to FDA — and USDC/SIS, who routinely inspect Chinese seafood processors. Although FDA did not inspect any seafood facility, FDA did use the information obtained from these third party inspection services coupled with FDA’s own observations during the inspections to assess the compliance status of each processor. Therefore, none of the facilities inspected by FDA in 2009 will be evaluated for exemption from import alert 16-131.
