Last fall, a Hampton Roads seafood processor pleaded guilty to mislabeling millions of dollars of foreign crab meat as Chesapeake Blue Crab. The federal investigation found James Casey falsely labeled and sold almost 400,000 pounds of crab meat after mixing local crab with crab from Asia, Central America, and South America.
According to Oceana, seafood fraud is pervasive and a growing problem.
The current Seafood Import Monitoring Program tracks fish to the U.S. border, but she said most of the tracking stops there. She said consumers need a better grasp on where foreign crab is shipped or potentially repackaged, with that information readily available to the buyer.
Oceana used DNA testing for a 2015 study into the mislabeling of Chesapeake Blue Crab. Testers can tell which region of the world a crab is from by surveying the meat.
LeeAnn Applewhite, CEO of Applied Food Technologies, said 80 percent of the crab her company receives for testing is either mixed or mislabeled.
Even the regulators share the concern of local watermen. Virginia Marine Police officers patrol the Chesapeake Bay and enforce commercial fishing regulations. Many know the crabbers on a first-name basis, and the officers check to make sure the fishermen are catching crabs that are large enough to harvest.
When seafood processors mix foreign crab with local crab the consumer won’t know what’s fresh, what’s expired, or what’s contaminated.
Waterman note that consumers can make one of the biggest differences just by insisting on pure Chesapeake Blue Crab and stores and restaurants.
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Well this for sure sounds like a vague representation of what is going on. For example, local crabbers, clammers, oystermen all have regulations to follow. Ignore the rules and the shellfish dept, or marine police take your product and fine your butt off. So what happened to James Casey ? Was his product confiscated and his fines 10 times the value of his shipment ? No mention of what happened to him makes me think nothing happened to him. IF SO, that would mean no one in the regulations enforcement part of the international processing is enforcing the rules. So what good does it do to suggest to the consumer that “they must insist” on fresh, local, properly marked packages. How are we supposed to know ? Or the person in the selling store ? Read the mislabeled label ? How about there’s a “possibility” that the international seafood import/export lobbyists wrote regulations that are vague and hard if not impossible to enforce ? Let’s have and expect USDA inspectors find the problems and resolve them. Let’s not throw it on the consumer.
He got 3 years 9 months prison. Sold 4.3 million$ meat. 15,000 s fine