Saving Seafood

FAO’s guidelines for human rights in fishing delayed after pushback

April 10, 2020 — Baseline international standards for human rights, labor conditions, and social responsibility in the seafood industry will have to wait.

Countries pushed back against draft guidance on social responsibility in fish value chains developed by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) when it was first officially presented in November in Vigo, Spain. As a result, FAO is spending the next year-plus creating a scoping paper that will more explicitly spell out what should be included in the guidance.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

FAO creating guidelines to combat human rights violations in fishing

October 17, 2019 — New international guidelines are being developed to confront substandard working conditions in the seafood industry by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

The FAO is creating the guidelines in response to increased scrutiny on labor violations and human rights abuses in the seafood industry. The guidelines, which were presented at the Conxemar International Congress on Social Sustainability on 30 September, will set an internationally accepted standard for companies and countries seeking to improve practices, clearly articulating core principles of social responsibility.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

UN Agency Puts Fast-growing Fish Trade on the ‘Sustainability’ Menu

February 22, 2016 — Top fishery officials are gathering in Morocco this week to discuss sustainable trade practices in a $144 billion industry that provides developing countries with more export revenue than meat, tobacco, rice and sugar combined.

Lower-income nations’ exports of fish and fishery products reached $78 billion in 2014, more than triple the value of global rice exports, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“Sustainably serving those lucrative markets is of critical importance to developing countries, where most fish are produced, whether caught in the wild or grown in cages or farm ponds,” the agency’s news release says.

The biennial high-level meeting of FAO’s Sub-Committee on Fish Trade, being held in Agadir through Friday, 26 February, has drawn delegations of fisheries ministries from more than 50 countries to discuss emerging governance needs of the fisheries sector.

“Trade in fish is much more important than people think, both in absolute and relative terms,” said Audun Lem, Deputy-Director in FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy and Resources Division, who serves as Secretary of the meeting.

Dialogues will help FAO, its member countries and industry representatives understand new trends, opportunities and challenges in the fishing sector, fostering the development of strategies that can “best position developing countries to develop their fisheries sectors in a sustainable manner and to maximize their economic benefit from the growth we expect to witness,” Mr. Lem said. Traceability

Read the full story at Bloomberg Business