Under an Agriculture Department rule that will become effective Monday, supermarkets will be required to state the country of origin of their seafood. Enforcement could be delayed for a few months.

Grocers to label fish by origin

Canadian swordfish. Thai shrimp. American salmon.

By next week, grocery shoppers who want to know where their seafood comes from will no longer have to guess or ask, because new federal regulations will require labels.

The "country of origin" labels are required as part of the Farm Bill of 2002 and will appear at larger grocery stores across the nation Monday on packages or on tags stuck in ice to identify all fresh or frozen seafood that is not processed, as opposed to fish sticks or crab cakes. The labels also will say whether the fish was caught in the wild or raised on a farm.

Similar labels on country of origin will be required next year on other foods, including beef and vegetables.

Advocates of the rules say consumers want the information for health reasons or because of a preference for American goods.

Industry officials say the new rules require recordkeeping throughout the supply chain, will be costly and might translate into higher prices for consumers. But, they say, the supermarkets will be ready.

"We've been working toward compliance for the last few years," said Barry F. Scher, a spokesman for Giant Food Inc. "It's been quite an undertaking. We get seafood from all over the world."

Scher said about 40 percent of the chain's seafood comes from the United States and the rest from dozens of countries. He said it is bought daily through a central office in Massachusetts.

Scher and others in the industry said the recordkeeping will be cumbersome. Grocery retailers and suppliers have opposed the rules over the past three years because of the potential costs, which have not yet been tabulated.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which developed the regulations, is expected to delay enforcement for six months to give the industry time to adjust or for it to revise the rules, if necessary.

Bill Greer, a director of editorial services for the Food Marketing Institute, which represents food retailers and wholesalers, said the industry is hoping the regulations are simplified.

There's a "lot of debate over costs and benefits over country-of-origin labeling as a whole," Greer said. "The general feeling has been that benefits will not outweigh the costs. But it's for the consumer to decide if he or she believes the information is valuable."

Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department, said consumers do want the information. And the rules have been modified to lessen the impact on industry, she said. They do not apply to restaurants or smaller grocers that sell less than $230,000 in goods annually.

Congress delayed implementation of the rules from last fall to give the industry more time.

And, Mattingly said, because of U.S. Customs law, grocers already know where their fish comes from.

Those laws require a host of goods that come canned, processed and fresh to be labeled for the end user. However, that means some fish that is imported and later made into a processed product in the United States is not labeled for consumers.

Until next week, retailers haven't had to specify whether a fish was caught in the wild or farm-raised.

For some grocers there will be virtually no changes, aside from the recordkeeping. Whole Foods Market Inc., an Austin, Texas-based chain that sells natural and organic foods and products, has always labeled its seafood voluntarily.

"If swordfish comes from Canada one day and the next day it comes from America, we already made a distinction," a Whole Foods spokesman said. "In general, I think this will affect what country some others buy from, maybe make some less apt to try new things. "

But one local company that supplies fish to supermarkets said nothing should change. Phillips Foods Inc., the Baltimore company, supplies fish as well as processed foods, such as its Maryland-style crab cakes, to groceries nationwide. Most of the food comes from Asian countries and Ecuador.

"There's definitely been an impact because of the recordkeeping, but we labeled before," said Melissa Sellers, the company's general counsel. "We had to comply with U.S. Customs laws for many of our products, and the new regulations only apply to fish that has not been processed in any way or breaded or covered in sauce. So we only had to add to some labels if the fish was wild or farm-raised."