SafeFish

SafeFish, provides technical advice to support Australia’s seafood trade and market access negotiations and helps to resolve barriers to trade.

SafeFish is primarily funded by the Fisheries Research & Development Corporation (FRDC) and is the leading platform in their program for dealing with food safety and trade and market access issues affecting Australian seafood.

Technical Program

The technical program is underpinned by a strategy to identify current and emerging food safety and market access issues, prioritise these issues, and undertake technical work to provide potential solutions to overcome those of highest priority. This is known as the SafeFish prioritisation process, and is used as a robust method of determining the work program.

Current Technical Research

Following the 2021 hazard identification and prioritisation process that was held, the following issues were identified as having the highest priority to the Australian seafood industry. For the 2022-2025 period technical research on the following items will be undertaken to assist in addressing them:

  • The impacts from Ready-to-eat (RTE) seafood due to consumer change with a focus on Listeria monocytogenes
  • Chemical contaminants
  • Vibrio in seafood
  • Micro and nano plastics in seafood (watching brief)
  • Ciguatera – progression of the delayed health care workers survey (and a continued watching brief)

Report an Issue

If you are aware of technical impediments to trade or food safety issues that you would like SafeFish to consider working on, please complete the following form.

Technical Reports

SafeFish produces technical reports to overcome issues of public health and market access significance for the Australian Seafood sectors.

Codex

SafeFish coordinates the production of technical advice in conjunction with and on behalf of industry to Codex Australia.

SafeFish Communiques

The SafeFish partnership group meets quarterly and produces a freely available communique of the main discussion points and outcomes from the meetings.

Latest Content

The latest collection of SafeFish technical reports, communication outputs, news and articles can be found here.

JULY 2020
Information

Novel Coronovirus and Food Safety

FSANZ have compiled a page dedicated to providing information around COVID-19. A key message portrayed in this information is ‘That there is no evidence that COVID-19 is transmitted through food’. To view this content, please click here.

FEBRUARY 2023
Scholarship

SafeFish Post-Graduate Scholarship

SafeFish is offering a post-graduate scholarship of $10,000pa to assist with research relating to market access and food safety of Australian seafood. For more information please click here, or to apply click here.

DECEMBER 2022
Annual Report

SafeFish Annual Report 2021-22

The 2021-2022 SafeFish Annual report is now available online. If you would like a printed version mailed to you, please contact the secretariat to request a copy.

APRIL 2020
Update

COVID-19 Update

The FRDC in conjunction with SafeFish and other relevant experts, have developed an industry briefing for seafood relating to the developing Coronovirus pandemic. To view the briefing, please click here.