Jim Ostergard of Thomaston has spent much of the last 15 years assisting both local and distant fishermen in implementing methods to meet international seafood product standards. His work training, inspecting, and developing safety and sanitation programs that meet federal Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) standards has taken him to eastern Europe, southeast Asia, and both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Meeting these standards is required for all seafood imports by both the United States and the European Union, and any vessels and producers hoping to export to these major markets want to ensure that their products will be approved.
Ostergard’s assignments range from speaking to downeast Maine crab pickers in their kitchens to spending days on large krill processing vessels fishing in Antarctica. The krill vessels he has most recently been assisting come to Uraguay for service, refitting and training by Jim. These large vessels can be nearly 500 feet long, and are self-contained fish factories with multiple processing decks, handling the product from catch to final retail form. They will be ten months or more away from their Russian homeports, catching and processing the abundant small crustaceans of the southern oceans, and delivering home loads of both canned and frozen product intended primarily for human consumption.
Other fisheries he has worked with as a consultant include the Indonesian and Bangladeshi shrimp industries, tropical aquaculture concerns that have grown considerably in size and exports in the last ten years, and far northern Pacific pollock fishing, which is the globe’s single largest fishery, and has meant consulting work with Alaskan vessels out of Dutch Harbor as well as Polish trawlers leaving from Korea and fishing the Sea of Okhotsk. After fishing himself for years out of many ports, including New Bedford, Woods Hole and other Cape Cod towns, and off the west coast, as well as working on research vessels and in the merchant marine, Jim is glad to be able to continue to use his knowledge of fisheries and familiarity with vessels to be able to bring modern safety and sanitation standards to this wide variety of vessels.
The HACCP system is, in simplest definition, a standardized international method for managing seafood safety processing. It is intended to deal with reducing processing contaminants, keeping bones and other unwanted fish products out of the final product, minimizing product deterioration from storage, and reducing internal parasites and pathogens. HACCP, as Ostergard describes it, is “really just a detailed methodology, which looks up front at picking out the critical points in the processing cycle that could introduce hazards, and identifying ways to deal with those problems proactively.”
This system has been applied to other seafood problems, including analysis and reduction of aquaculture salmon escapees here in Maine. The goal is to develop a transparent system that will be standardized across the vessels of many nations to insure that all imports meet the same level of quality. A plan must be on record for any importer, stating in English their HACCP plan. Assistance in the development of this plan is one of the services Ostergard provides, and the plan is subsequently verified by the National Marine Fisheries Service and is enforced by the Food and Drug Administration.