Since early this year, many Vietnamese seafood products have been warned by the European Union for containing banned substance.
According to the National Agro, Forestry and Fisheries Quality Assurance Department (Nafiqad), the EU issued alerts on 11 shipments of Vietnam's seafood products found to have surpassed the permitted content of metals such as mercury and cadmium between January and September this year.
The number of EU warnings for Vietnamese seafood products during the January-September period increased by 2.2 times against the same period of 2015, said Nafiqad.
The EU issued alerts on 11 shipments of Vietnamese seafood products so far this year
By late April this year, the EU issued warnings to four Vietnamese seafood exporters, that had shipments to several European countries for failing to pass food safety checks. The companies, Mekong Delta Food Factory, South Vina, Foodtech JSC and Khang Thong JSC Seafood Processing Factory, failed to pass food safety checks to enter the EU, according to the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed.
Nafiqad said that the number of warnings sharply increased since late May when the EU urged management agencies of its member countries to tighten control on heavy metal content in Vietnamese seafood batches.
Nafiqad has urged seafood exporters to focus on checking heavy metals on their products, particularly pay attention to the origin of materials bought to serve the processing for exports.
Under Nafiqad's instruction, companies need to test samples of seafood caught from the central region which has been hit by recently the mass death fish due to toxic discharges from Fomosa.
Vietnamese seafood exports have previously received warnings over the use of antibiotics and banned chemicals in the US, Japan and Saudi Arabia.