Saving Seafood

Taiwan’s tuna industry adopts CCTV, blockchain in effort to mend image

November 22, 2021 — The Taiwan Tuna Association has teamed up with the National Chung Cheng University to trial a video-monitoring system aboard its fishing vessels, aimed at stamping out labor abuses.

The TTA said it’s using a government grant to install the surveillance systems on its distant-water fishing vessels, allowing onshore monitoring and the use of blockchain to guarantee the validity of the captured data. The move comes as part of a three-year experimental project titled “Fulfilling the Protection of Human Rights at Sea and Supporting the Sustainable Development of Fisheries with Technology: Establishing Person-Centered Decent Labor Policies in Distant Water Fisheries.” The project is funded in part by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology, which plans to set up a communication platform for stakeholders “utilizing advanced technologies, such as big data and blockchain,” according to the TTA.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Hook to plate: how blockchain tech could turn the tide for sustainable fishing

June 9, 2021 — In recent weeks, a new $50m (£35m) hybrid vessel set sail from Mauritius and headed out into the Southern Ocean where the crew will spend three months longline fishing for the Patagonian toothfish. By the time the fish are brought back, processed and sent to customers, consumers will know where and when that specific fish was caught, which boat landed it, who processed it and which certifications have been met. The technology enabling this is blockchain.

“From the day it’s landed to when it ends up on someone’s plate, blockchain gives toothfish traceability right from the start,” says Steve Paku, captain of the Cape Arkona. “People can just scan the barcode and the whole story is right there in front of them.”

Blockchain is just one way that fisheries are trying to ensure better traceability from hook to plate but it is garnering a lot of interest. Blockchain cannot be tampered with and the data can be accessed by everyone along the supply chain, from certification schemes to the final consumer. Because it is digital, decentralised and updated in real time, a blockchain tag contains valuable information that a physical label never could. In combination with DNA testing to prove the specific species of fish, blockchain could play a role in reducing fraud in the seafood industry.

This also matters from a conservation perspective. More than a third of fish populations are overfished, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO). Guaranteeing where and how a fish has been caught can help ensure that the catch has been made in an area with sustainable fish populations. It can also help tackle the problem of bycatch. In degrading marine ecosystems, bycatch is detrimental to biodiversity and puts additional, unnecessary strain on marine wildlife. Young fish get caught up in nets with too small a mesh, turtles and dolphins can get entangled in gillnets, and seabirds, including endangered albatross, get injured by hooks unless deterrents are put in place.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Dutch firm harnesses DNA, blockchain for sturgeon traceability solution

May 21, 2021 — A Dutch firm is harnessing blockchain and DNA to disable what it has identified as a burgeoning illicit trade in wild sturgeon passed off as farmed product.

Geneusbiotech, which describes itself as a “genomics specialist company,” has introduced a traceability solution for sturgeon and caviar sold in Europe in a three-year collaboration with the Berlin Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB). The Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based company develops solutions for the food, luxury goods, and pharma sectors.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Tech-forward seafood firms join forces to upload product quality data to blockchain

April 7, 2021 — Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, U.S.A.-based Envisible has joined forces with Juneau, Alaska, U.S.A.-headquartered Certified Quality Foods, Inc., which does business as Seafood Analytics, in a push to capture quality product data on the former’s blockchain-enabled Wholechain traceability system.

The initiative will initially focus on sockeye salmon sold by Northline Seafoods in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Utilizing Seafood Analytics’ handheld certified quality reader (CQR) device, Northline will gather product quality metrics and measure the electrical properties of its salmon at the point of harvest.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Bumble Bee Sees ‘Overwhelming’ Positivity From Retailers Since Blockchain Supply Chain Launch

July 10, 2019 — In the fall of 2018, leading shelf-stable seafood provider Bumble Bee Foods began utilizing blockchain technology to track products all the way through its supply chain. The brand has seen significant success from harnessing the abilities housed within the cutting edge technology.

“We’ve had nothing but overwhelming positive feedback from the industry and retailers,” Bumble Bee Foods senior vice-president and CIO Tony Costa told me in an interview.

As a top provider of shelf-stable seafood in North America, Bumble Bee produces products such as canned tuna, salmon and clams. The company also works with frozen goods. “Part of this project is [an] extension of our company. We have another frozen piece of our business called Anova, which we do most of our procurement and resourcing through Asia, mainly out of Indonesia,” Costa said. “The blockchain project has focused around the handline fisheries in Indonesia,” he noted. The project is underway for Bumble Bee’s Natural Blue line, which is part of its Anova brand.

Bumble Bee’s blockchain incorporation uses the technology to track its products from fishers to end consumers, ensuring aspects such as data accuracy and tracking all the way through the supply chain. The beef and grain industries saw similar blockchain application for supply chain with BeefChain and GrainChain.

Read the full story at Forbes

SIMP helping to drive seafood’s blockchain moment

June 24, 2019 — It’s not your imagination. The seafood industry is talking a lot more than usual about Bitcoin these days.

But don’t worry. There’s no effort afoot to launch a new form of seafood-themed cryptocurrency — though “Fishscales” would have a nice ring to it.

Rather, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s implementation of its new Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) requirements is helping to drive a great deal of interest in blockchain, the digital technology that underlies Bitcoin, Sean O’Scannlain, the president and CEO of Fortune Fish & Gourmet, told Undercurrent News in a telephone interview this week.

Besides running one of the US’ largest seafood wholesalers, O’Scannlain is also chairman of the Seafood Industry Research Fund (SIRF), a 55-year-old group that has provided almost $4 million in grants to help create about 400 research papers, all publicly available. Roughly a week ago, the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) announced that SIRF would be launching a pilot aimed at enabling the industry to better use blockchain, increasing transparency, optimizing supply chain processes and combating fraud.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

NFI, SIRF partner on seafood blockchain pilot with IBM

June 12, 2019 — The National Fisheries Institute (NFI), with financial support from the Seafood Industry Research Fund (SIRF), announced 11 June it is partnering with IBM’s Food Trust to create a blockchain-based seafood supply chain traceability program.

NFI is the largest U.S. seafood industry trade group. IBM’s Food Trust is a blockchain-based system that creates a shared record of food data, and that system will introduced to NFI members. Members – including harvesters, importers, processers, cold storage, foodservice restaurants, and retailers – are all involved with the program.

“We are excited that NFI and the real seafood value-chain will test IBM’s technology,” NFI President John Connelly said.  “NFI members’ supply chains are dynamic and wide-reaching, a fertile ground for this type of pilot.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Something’s ‘Fishy’ On The Blockchain, But Can This Tech Reduce Seafood Fraud?

August 6, 2018 –Whitebait or halibut? Now, are you sure that the expensive “Wild-caught” Atlantic salmon you had for dinner last night was in fact the gourmet fish you thought it was? Or, was it just a cheaper farm-grown salmon – or perhaps not even salmon at all? This is not the shipping news, but you’ll get the picture pretty soon.

Moreover, can you be 100% sure the tasty white tuna sushi your local sushi bar serves is actually made from tuna – and not from escolar – also known as oil fish?

What is the big deal, you might ask. Well, escolar is quite notorious for its delicious, cheap and oily meat. Meat that causes intense stomach problems, in other words, nasty uncontrollable diarrhoea.

Now, how likely is it for a sushi restaurant to serve its hungry customers fish with such severe side effects? Or for that matter how common is fraud in general in the seafood industry? The whole scene will probably surprise the average person, if they have not already delved into some research about the topic. So, let us get down to the nub of it.

From 2010 to 2012, Oceana, one of the largest organizations focusing on studying oceans founded by a group of leading foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, conducted a study exploring fraud in the seafood industry. According to the research as much as one-third of seafood products in the United States (U.S.) were mislabelled. Shocked?

Read the full story at Forbes

Rights to Fish & Data Rights: How blockchain technologies could help

July 16, 2018 — The right to fish could be considered one of the most basic human rights. It is probably a notion that goes back to when we first began fishing, and certainly as a more formal concept when Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), in 1609. However, shared resource systems can lead to what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons. First coined in an essay by British economist William Forster Lloyd in 1833, it refers to the failure of a system where all individuals have equal and open access to a resource. With 90% of global seafood stocks at maximum exploitation or on the verge of collapse, the over-fishing of fish stocks are perhaps the most commonly used example to explain Lloyd’s concept.

In an attempt to avert such tragedies, governments look to regulation, privatisation, and the move toward internalising externalities (e.g. user or polluter pay). In the fisheries sector, governments have stuck mostly to regulation in their attempts to better manage fisheries, and this is mainly achieved by managing inputs (e.g. number of boat licences, permits, seasonal closures) to ensure sustainable output. However regulation without monitoring, compliance, surveillance (MCS), and/or convictions of offenders could be considered meaningless.

Privatisation as a tool to avert fisheries collapse through Rights Based Fisheries Management (RBFM) is becoming a more popular and, arguably, a much more effective way to manage fisheries. As an example, Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQ) allocates a portion of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) to an individual fisher who effectively owns this share of the fish stock. If a fish stock increases, governments can increase TACs and fishers can then catch more fish, thus incentivising all fishers to fish at levels where fish stocks increase or are maintained at a biomass where they can fish at what is known as Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) . In the case of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) a fisher can also sell or lease his or her quota, thus the value of their “stock” increases with increasing fish stock.

Read the full story at Medium

How to Make Sure Your Fish Wasn’t Caught by Slaves

September 8, 2016 — For years, news outlets have been reporting on the systemic use of slavery in commercial fishing in places such as New Zealand and Thailand. With much of the industry’s byproduct ending up in the United States and Europe—according to a report in The Guardian, “The U.S., U.K., and E.U. are prime buyers of this seafood—with Americans buying half of all Thailand’s seafood exports and the U.K. alone consuming nearly 7 percent of all Thailand’s prawn exports.”—there’s a strong possibility that at some point, slave-caught fish has been served on a dinner plate near you. But thanks to blockchain, a technology best known as the basis for Bitcoin, soon there will be a new digital weapon to fight slave labor.

“We want to help support fish that is caught sustainably and verify these claims down the chain to help drive the market for slavery-free fish,” Provenance founder Jessi Baker told the Guardian. Provenance is an organization dedicated to socially responsible consumerism—it recently began piloting a blockchain program with the Co-Op Food group in the United Kingdom. “This pilot shows that complex, global supply chains can be made transparent by using blockchain technology.”

Currently, the only way to track the progress of seafood through the region’s supply chain is with paper records and tagged animals. According to the Guardian, the world’s biggest tuna exporter, the Thai Union, is all for utilizing blockchain technology. “Traceability—which allows us to prove that our fish is caught legally and sustainably and that safe labor conditions are met throughout the supply chain—is vital if we are to interest consumers in the source of their tuna,” the union’s director of sustainability Dr. Darian McBain told the paper.

Read the full story at Food & Wine