Smuggling of fresh seafood to Saudi Arabia is going through Dubai transit after the Kingdom placed restrictions on import of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani fish and shrimp products recently, fisheries sources said on Friday. "Saudi municipal administration banned sales of fisheries items exported from sub-continent countries after finding pig-meat ingredients in Indian farm fish and shrimp," sources said, adding that the Pakistani seafood export also suffered for not qualified to the Kingdom's food specifications.
About a couple of weeks ago, Kuwait had also rejected Pakistan's consignments of fresh seafood products for being unsuitable for human consumption, for which exporters of frozen fish and shrimp products widely held Marine Fisheries Department (MFD) responsible. Sources said that both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were the major markets for Pakistani fresh seafood items. They feared that losing of either market will pull down the country's annual foreign exchange earning from fisheries sector.
"India's farm fish and shrimp outstretched their shares to upstage export of Pakistan in Middle East but soon were found with prohibited substance of pig-meat in the kingdom major cities, which also caused import and sales restriction to Pakistani seafood too," sources said. To offset the Saudi restrictions, Pakistani traders are now using Dubai as a route to smuggle the seafood items into Kingdom's key cities, they said, adding that the government is unable to check the illegal trade from the country's fisheries sector.
Previously, Iran was the major market of Pakistani smuggled seafood but the US and EU trade sanctions on the oil-rich neighbouring state for its nuclear pursuit, reduced the illegal fisheries trade from Pakistan. Earlier, Pakistan Fisheries Exporters Association (Pakfea) blamed MFD for its weak administration to check poor quality of fresh seafood products bound for export to Middle East and other parts of the world.
Pakfea made it clear that its member exporters of the fresh and frozen seafood products were fully complying with the EU and other world markets safety and health standards. However, it quickly disowned the fresh seafood exporters using fake documents to export low-quality fresh seafood consignments to world markets. Pakistan's seafood export in July-October 2013-14 increased to $117. 651 million from $98.732 million in the same period of 2012-13, depicting a increase of $18.919 million or 16.43 percent, the official statistics suggest.
