Brazilian legal framework on shellfish safety and its effects on the growth of shellfish farming and commerce

Shellfish are among the most at-risk foods of the occidental culture, requiring special control along all the production chain to provide safe products to the population. Codex Alimentarius regulations offer orientations to the control and guarantee of shellfish safety, but the practical application of their indications shall be hampered at the local level by several elements: political, logistic and geographic, as examples. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the Brazilian legislative framework on shellfish safety in comparison to those proposed by other trading blocs, mainly the European Community and the USA. Our analysis points out how the simple application of international guidelines on shellfish safety designed for non-tropical areas, the lack of political interest, and scientific orientation, and the concentration of reference laboratories in the extreme south of Brazil, hamper the development of safe and legal shellfish farming and commerce in the rest of the country.