Current Status Of Traceability Systems For Aquaculture Products In Thailand

Fisheries Situation in Thailand

Fisheries production, including culture-based and capture fisheries, had gradually decreased from 2005 to 2011. Fisheries statistics of Thailand indicated that total fisheries production decreased from 4.2 million tons in 2005 to 3.04 million tons in 2011, but the value increased from 4,407.1 million US$ to 5,085.6 million US$. There are 4 main sectors for Thailand fisheries: (1) Marine fishing (2) Inland fishing (3) Coastal Aquaculture and (4) Freshwater culture.

Marine fishing production decreased by an average 10% per year from 2.6 million tons in 2005 to 1.6 million tons in 2011. The value of this sector also decreased from 1,975.7 million US$ to 1,551.0 million US$. Inland fishing production comprises of 7.4% of the total, most is small scale fisheries and for domestic consumption. The production of this sector increased from 198,800 tons in 2005 to 224,700 tons in 2011and also the value increased from 245.4 million US$ to 332.4 million US$.

Coastal aquaculture is a very important sector for Thailand fisheries. The production of this sector increased from 764,700 tons in 2005 to 817,000 tons in 2011 and the value also increased from 1,555.9 million US$ to 2,544.5 million US$. Most of the coastal aquaculture production came from shrimp aquaculture (Peaneus vanaemei). Cultured species in this sector include white shrimp (Peaneus vanaemei), sea bass, grouper, green mussel, blood cockle, mud crab and swimming crab. Freshwater culture production decreased from 539,400 tons in 2005 to 384,400 tons in 2011.

rosenbergii) and snakehead fish. However, the value increased from 630.1 US$ to 657.8 million US$.

Import and export:

• Import

➢ In 2009, Thailand imported 1.6 million tons of fisheries products, and its value is 68.5 million baht. The main import product is fish. The main commodities are fresh chilled and frozen tuna (52.38) and other fresh chilled and frozen fish (31.37%). Tuna products are mainly canned and other fish are processed into surimi and fillets.

• Export

➢ In 2009, Thailand exported fisheries products in amount of 1.9 million tons, and its value was 224,542 million baht. The main products are canned tuna, frozen shrimp and frozen fish and the value are 52.9, 91.9 and 23.1 million baht respectively.

Thai Shrimp Traceability System:

Thai Shrimp Production

Marine Shrimp is one of an important aquaculture export product of Thailand. According to the national fisheries statistics reported, the export volume was approximately 250,000 metric tons per year and its value was over 70 billion baht. The highlight of export value increase significantly in the year 2000 which was up to 100 billion baht. By the high exportation volume, Thailand, then, became the number one country of the world largest black tiger shrimp exporter for more than a decade with 30% of global market share. This shrimp industry not only brings in revenues to the country but also provide career opportunities for the whole supply chain for more than one million people in Thailand.

Since shrimp farming has been booming, the successfulness in expanding culture area and production had in turn caused a problem. With the lack of awareness on the maintenance of good environmental condition and poor farming practices of the farmers, the harsh chemical and veterinary drug, especially antibiotics were often applied and misused at farms. This had caused the shrimp products to encompass existing antibiotics residue, which in turn also caused the volume of shrimp exports to reduce drastically.

With the concern of Thai government on the safe products to human health, various Ministries have been working together to solve the problem and to ensure safe food products. Some of these Ministries are Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of

Interior. In 2004, the food safety year programme was started, as the Royal Thai Government declared

“Food Safety Year” which many activities in regulation and monitoring started implementation, in order to improve food quality for human safe consumption.

Some of the examples of the various agricultural products at the early stage of the Thai Food Safety Programme are fish and shrimp products. This is not only to seve the national policy of Food-safety but also to promote fisheries products from Thailand.

The Department of Fisheries of Thailand (DOF) has set up various food-safety projects and one of them are fish food standard and the implementations of traceability system.

Shrimp Traceability System

With the need of global market for the quality and safety products, the better and more efficient traceability system is in an urgent need for Thailand whom is known as one of the top shrimp exporters of the world. The DOF has created the manual documentation traceability system in 2002 known as “Fry Movement Document” or FMD and

“Movement document” or MD. However, this manual documentation system has not been completed for the whole supply chain and are not well functioned.

There are some shortcomings that require more improvements. The elements of raw materials to feed production and feed distribution to hatchery or farm have not been included.

A model of Computerized Traceability System seems to be very well accepted and efficient in the global market. In this regard, the DOF has put an effort to develop the traceability system in particular marine shrimp. The concept of traceability and computerized traceability system has been developed with assistance of France Government by French experts under Thai-France Cooperation Program since year 2002, as a continuing program of certification program for CoC shrimp and labelling started earlier since 2000.

Thai TraceShrimp

Computerized Traceability System of DOF known as TraceShrimp was created in 2005 with assistance from the French expert. TraceShrimp is the opportunity to enhance shrimp traceability capability providing a reliable traceability management tool not only for Thai shrimp stakeholders but also for their local and foreign clients. The programme developed as tool to enabling applicable function to trace and track back of shrimp products from Shrimp producers and many other local and foreign clients.

In basic principle, TraceShrimp enables traceability management, beyond the national legislation and the international standards on traceability for a better access to world trade exchanges. Its step by step

approach helps TraceShrimp’s members to build robust and efficient traceability systems so that the inter-stakeholders traceability throughout the whole production chain can be guaranteed.

The TraceShrimp programme develops for any producer applied to be a member. The member, then can remote record and transfer traceability data all along the chain of production. These stakeholders required to be certified to a quality assurance program e.g. Good Aquaculture Practices (GAP), Code of Conduct (CoC), Bio Shrimp are subjected to regular controls by the Thailand Department of Fisheries (DOF) to guaranty the accuracy of the information transmitted to TraceShrimp.

In addition, TraceShrimp has been designed as inter-operators traceability data exchange device for Thai Shrimp supply chain, the focus here is on the capture of data necessary to follow the product from one link in the supply chain to the next such that traceability is established through all stages of production, processing and distribution. Moreover, even if TraceShrimp does not focus on internal traceability, it makes an incentive for the stakeholders to improve internal traceability.

Following the whole system of TraceShrimp, it is ensured to provide a secure, automated product tracking and confidential online data exchange between operators in Thailand and in the countries of exportation.

Besides enhancing the paper based traceability in Thailand (Fry Movement document and Movement Document), TraceShrimp can be sued to record, review and report supply chain traceability data.

Data report can be found with an invoice number, a delivery bill number, a product lot number or an event data (data of purchase, or production, etc.).

Data can also be transferred from TraceShrimp data base to any other client or partner database.

The volunteer actors involved may include hatcheries, nurseries, farms, shrimp distributors, processors, exporters/importers and retailers. The users are

mainly the customers in the exportation countries so they can learn about the quality standards all along the supply chain up to the feed given to the fry and the shrimp.

TraceShrimp is a collective organization managed by Thailand Department of Fisheries, impartial in management and guarantee of confidentiality.

Last year (2013), Thailand Department of Fisheries set the training course for the volunteer actors of the whole supply chain such as shrimp hatchery, shrimp farm, processing plant, feed producer and distributor. For that training, there are 4 main supply chain who are interested in Thai Traceshrimp system and are involved to test the system. In conclusion, the system should be developed to support the client in many sections such as the template, the linked information, the server of database and etc.

Moving forward,, Thailand Department of Fisheries will plan to train the administrator of the membership and DoF staff who services the Thai traceshrimp system for client in next year 2015.

Unfortunately, at this moment, Thai Traceshrimp system cannot operate due to system error. Thailand Department of Fisheries would try to solve this problem by establishing the system on the new stabilizer server.

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