Russia's Baltic customs enforcing traceability of fish fillets to source of raw material

The Baltic customs has announced new requirements for customs clearance of fish fillets, reports www.fishnet-russia.com (www.fishnet.ru) with reference to a spokesman from Saint-Petersburg-based seafood importer and trader.

In particular, the customs is going to strictly control origin of fish fillets (namely, date and place of capture, time, place and method of processing, date, place and method of freezing, date and place of packaging, storage term and place), their actual price (via export declarations), as well as fillet weight. A spokesman of the customs has also notified traders that they are going to take into account the weight of glazing. Containers filled with fillets will be weighted at electronic scales with the data to be automatically transferred to the customs server thus eliminating possible "business lubrication" for settling the issue. In case of discovery of non-declared volumes a special protocol will be written and the importer will be obliged to file an extra veterinary certificate for these volumes.

In the closing week of January 2009 reports came about several cases of detention due to overweight. Asian suppliers normally have problems with declaration of actual gross weight as most of them automatically label 26,500 kilos, which is not always true. However, it is not clear whether the announced new requirements will affect only lots of fish fillets shipped from Asia. Russian importers think that probably they will cover fish fillets from all the sources.

In the meantime, no official requirements to the documents have been forwarded to the market players so far.

In the Ukraine the system of controlling net and gross weight of fish fillets is just the same, one market player wrote to forum at https://www.fishnet.ru/.