March 17, 2016 — Seafood businesses are embracing an unusual way to reduce the risks posed by unsustainable practices and capacity challenges throughout the seafood supply chain: collaborating with their competitors, and even helping them make money.
That’s not a natural step for many businesses. But as industry leaders are proving, it’s sometimes the only way to address the complex sustainability issues embedded in the global seafood market. Building on their successful collaborations with NGOs (also once considered unthinkable by many in the seafood industry), seafood buyers, marketers and processors are using pre-competitive strategies as a way to ensure their long-term business health.
These strategies — collaborative market actions taken by competitive entities — are often the only way to address the system-level sustainability challenges in the seafood industry.
As in other industries (coffee and forest products, for example) in which pre-competitive strategies have improved social and environmental conditions, seafood businesses are responding to a market where competition for limited resources affects their business more than competition for customers does. If you don’t have the resource base to deliver products, you won’t have any consumers.