A new technique for making seafood traceable down to the where-when-and-what of every individual catch is being tested in Swedish stores.
The project run jointly by the Board of Fisheries, scientists at the University of Lund and the sector, is based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) where data is read from a computer chip on the fish box by a hand scanner, then transmitted by radio waves and connected to the Board of Fisheries’ log system.
The log information includes the size, time and position of the catch, the species caught and with what gear, as well as the port of landing. In the future, with the computer chips to be moulded into the fish boxes, the participants in the project hope it will be virtually impossible to sell unreported catches.
The RFID technique is already widely used in some electronic charge cards, public transportation passes and lift cards at ski resorts. The overall system is called eTrace, originally developed by the US federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to share traced firearm data with other law enforcement agencies.