y the Australian Barramundi Farmers Association showed 60 percent of the 20,000 tonnes of barramundi eaten by Australians each year is from foreign fisheries, Good Food reports.The heads of four major seafood bodies, including the National Seafood Industry Alliance, want seafood labelling laws to be extended to the restaurant industry, which is exempt.
Country of origin information should be published next to seafood dishes on menus so that consumers can be “protected from deception", they said.
“When people order barramundi, they just think it’s Australian,” said Scott Wiseman of the Seafood Industry Alliance. “There’s a requirement to know the fish species, but not whether it’s Australian. They have the right to make a full purchasing decision.”
Helen Jenkins of the Australian Prawn Farmers Association told the Federal parliamentary inquiry into country of origin labelling the Northern Territory had successfully applied labelling of origin laws to all its food sectors, including restaurants, in 2008. It remains the only jurisdiction to do so.
“It’s time for uniformity across Australia,” she said. "We'd like it to be legislated."
He said research of dining behaviour showed the country of origin of a product did not feature among the top factors that swayed purchasing decisions.
“We ranked a number of different factors, included origin, local produce, nutritional content. They were the eighth, ninth order issues. Primary order issue was the quality of product,” he said.
The seafood industry is the latest to be investigated by the inquiry, following the beekeeping and pork industry.
