Amund Maage, Helge Hove & Kaare Julshamn
National Institute of Nutrition and Seafood Research (NIFES) P.O.Box 2029 Nordnes, N-5817 BERGEN, NORWAY

Several surveillance programs with the aim of controlling and documenting the content of undesirable substances in marine foods are ongoing in Norway.

Some of these programs are focused directly towards food quality while others are more designed at environmental monitoring than food monitoring. The latter includes several "hot spot" programs at sites and areas with known pollution and is often financed through the Ministry of Environment.

Several of the programs aimed at food and marine feed quality was up to 1.1.2004 administered by the Directorate of Fisheries but the responsibility was then taken over by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (NFSA) which then also took over surveillance responsibilities of marine foods.

The regular programs include:

- surveillance of marine feed and feed ingredients for aquaculture

- surveillance of cultured bivalves

- surveillance of medical residues in cultured fish, mainly salmon

- EU program on dioxins in food, where Norway provides data on a large number of fish fillets and fish meals and oils

- monitoring of certain processed seafood products

- other minor documentation projects.

NIFES has the responsibilities for running the above mentioned programs also in 2004 and further on behalf of the NFSA.

NIFES has also since 1994 built up their own surveillance program focusing the concentration of undesirable substances in important wild caught fish species. The aim is to deliver independent quality data for the government, consumers and industry and we are starting to be able to show time trends.

In this program sampling frequencies of different marine species are selected based on their economic importance or by virtue of their catch volume (industrial fish). Sampling frequency is thereby every year or every second year for species such as salmon, cod, herring and mackerel while more infrequent for species like ling, tusk and Greenland halibut.

NIFES has gradually built up their capacity of different chemical and microbiological analyses for the purpose of the surveillance. The running methods now include: total metal content is analysed by ICP-MS; speciation of metals now include Me-Hg+ and TBT by GC-ICP-MS; inorganic arsenic by LC-ICP-MS, dioxins and dioxin-like PCB's by HRGC-HRMSS, and further poly-brominated flame retardants by GC-MS. PCB, PAH and pesticides are also analysed by GC-MS and also further compounds such as anti-oxidants.

From this year on analyses of a variety of nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids and different carbohydrates will be included in this program.

Because of the increasing oil and gas activity in the Barents Sea the Norwegian government has increased their ambitions on monitoring environmental quality and seafood quality in this marine area. The project of collection and analysing samples for our programme is therefore double from about 300 samples in 2006 to more than 700 samples in 2007.

Most of our data show that fish from the open oceans are well below established limits for contaminants in fish trade. Some exceptions have been data on mercury in Greenland halibut and data on dioxins in large halibut.

Examples of results will be presented and results from the latter program can be found at www.nifes.no . We think that these data also represent a value for Russian fisheries as Russian fishermen are harvesting many of the same species in the same areas.

An important aspect is that we now in additions to analysing contaminants, increasing our activity on documenting also the desirable substances in seafood. This includes such parameters as iodine, selenium, vitamins A and D and also the polyunsaturated fatty acids, which have gained tremendous focus since it was approved for positive health claims in USA. This is important as it is not enough to document the seafood safety to keep seafood as popular food choice for the consumer. In addition it must be regarded healthy and tasteful.

FISHERY IN NORTH ATLANTIC: REALITY AND PROSPECTS