The Federal Agriculture Department is under fire for not doing enough to protect the Logan River prawn farming industry from imported diseases.
Logan prawn farmer Alistair Dick believes the rules for imports are not stopping white spot and other diseases entering Australia.
Mr Dick is the General Manager of Gold Coast Marine Aquaculture prawn farm on the Logan River. Since the white spot outbreak in 2016 the business has lost more than $40 million dollars.
He believes exporters of prawns should be required to do the same as Australian prawn farmers and cook them before they’re exported to prevent the transfer of disease.
“It is ridiculous, it’s absolutely ridiculous. This whole double standard thing – I think the Agriculture Department is going to have a whole lot of trouble explaining how that works because we certainly can’t understand it”.
Only three prawn farms are still operating on Logan River and last year two were reinfected with white spot.
Currently raw prawns can be imported under strict federal guidelines.
But Mr Dick believes it’s possible those guidelines are not stopping infected prawns coming into Australia.
“We’re relying on sample testing and when you actually look at what the Agriculture Department is doing is testing a very small sample from every container and what we saw through a previous operation in 2015 and 2016 is that many importers had multiple ways of getting around this testing. So, this is why in 2016 something like 85 % of the prawns in supermarkets tested positive for white spot and we still, when we do our own independent testing now we still get a decent amount of white spot infected prawns”.
Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud isn’t happy with the current import regulations because they don’t recommend any major changes to biosecurity laws or testing for white spot disease and yellow head virus.
