Besides legal regulations, according to the department of promoting commerce (Vietrade) – Department of Industry and Trade, when exporting frozen seafood to Hong Kong, exporting enterprises of Vietnam have to pay attention to non-statutory regulations of this market.

For example, all of the frozen fish (not including the fresh shells, seafood and entrepôt fish) have to be landed to port and sold to traders from clue markets which have been managed by Marketing Organization of seafood.

Unless a certificate issued by director of Marketing, no kinds of fresh fish would be carried on land or by waterway of Hong Kong exceeding 60kg.

Everyone breaks this regulation will have to pay up to 10,000 HKD and will be imprisoned on 6 months.

Especially, the Provision 59, part 1 of the Decree about public health and national activities permit the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department to have the right to expose the specific procedure for checking importing food.

Now, when the products of seafood have mandated to be landed in port in Hong Kong will be checked and be taken an example by this Department. If importers can not expose the certificate of public health while being checked, this Department will take an example of these products to check first before giving back,

Food and Environmental Hygiene Department of Hong Kong has exposed a behaving regulation including minimum regulations about importing and selling any kinds of seafood in order to consume to ensure safe food especially to prevent and to check the poison ciguatera in fish.

This regulation has applied for all of the importers, traders (including farms of fish at Hong Kong) and retailing stores (including restaurant of selling fresh fish).

Importing and consuming sea fish which have been used for users, have to have any method of preventing and checking the poison Ciguatera in fish. The poison Ciguatera in fish has been recorded to appear continuously in Hong Kong, sometimes it has become a large outbreak.

This toxic has appeared essentially while eating fish eating stone corals. This plant contains this toxic on body, especially on the viscera so that when eating any kinds of small fish, people will eat poison seaweed at the regions of stone corals. In general, the more fish were, the more poison were.

In order to perform any methods of management quickly and effectively in case of discovering the poison fish, many importers, buying traders and retail traders have to keep any exact proofs about supplying and distributing all kinds of sea fish with the detail of the origin, the destination, distribution, mass, kind of fish, name and the address of the buyers, distributors on the minimum 60 days from the day of trading. These proofs will be useful for surveying of agent of government if it has been necessary.

Source: Cong Thuong Newspaper

Translated by Vietfish Community