Odisha Channel Bureau
Bhubaneswar: Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) has opened its refurbished Quality Control Laboratory at Nayapalli area of the city to ensure high-precision tests using state-of-the-art equipment that can also detect banned antibiotics.
The facility, which has shifted to Raptani Bhavan, was inaugurated by MPEDA Chairman K S Srinivas on Saturday. It will provide facilitate testing of antibiotic residue in farmed shrimps as per the regulatory requirements prescribed by the importing countries and the Export Inspection Council (EIC) of India as well.
The lab will also issue PHT (pre-harvest test) certificates to aquaculture farmers as per the regulatory requirements for export of farmed shrimps to the European Union.
The lab will pursue accreditation by the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) as per ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and approval by the Export Inspection Council (EIC) soon after inauguration.
Srinivas highlighted the lab’s “strategic location”, as it ensures processing and export of residue-free shrimps produced in not just Odisha but neighbouring West Bengal as well. “Together, the two States contribute to 11% of the cultured shrimp production in the country,” he pointed out.
The Nayapalli laboratory has sophisticated devices such as liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometers, high-performance liquid chromatographs and automated ELISA reader. The test parameters include nitrofuran metabolites, chloramphenicol, nitroimidazole, sulphonamides, quinolones, flouroquinolones and tetracyclines with 4-epimers.
He noted that Odisha has shown an average annual growth of 13% in the export of marine products over the past decade: from 21,311 metric tonnes (worth Rs. 800 crore) in 2011-12 to 66,654 MT (Rs. 3,243 crore in 2019-20).
Odisha is India’s third-largest state’s producing cultured shrimp, with a 6.2% share in the country’s total shrimp production. When it comes to cultured shrimps of the exotic vannamei variety, the State has registered an average of 52% yearly growth in production: from 100 MT in 2012-13 to 44,007 MT in 2019-20.
Odisha’s seafood finds major markets in China (37%) and USA (36%). The other countries that buy the products are Japan and Southeast nations besides European.
