December 5, 2018 — Ryan Bigelow, the senior program manager for Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, sees Japan as a country ripe for seafood sustainability ratings like those his program provides.
Japan’s population consumes a vast amount of seafood – collectively, the country has one of the largest seafood consumption footprints in the world (third behind China and the European Union) – and because of that, an improvement in the overall sustainability of the seafood sold and eaten in Japan can have a major impact.
Seafood Watch’s Buyers Guide, which gives seafood either a “best choice,” a “good alternative”, or “avoid” recommendation to seafood commonly found in supermarkets, is well-known in the United States. (Its ratings are color-coded green, yellow, and red, similar to the colors found in traffic signals.)
The guide is tailored to each U.S. state in order to give recommendations relevant to the seafood available there. They can be downloaded in PDF form on a single page and easily folded into a wallet or pocketbook.
But Bigelow openly acknowledges that Japanese consumers are not familiar with Seafood Watch’s guides.
“We don’t promote our program there,” he told SeafoodSource.
Still, for the fourth consecutive year, Bigelow attended the Tokyo Sustainable Seafood Symposium, which took place at Iino Hall and Conference Center on 1 November. Initiated in 2015, the annual event brings together Japanese professionals involved in the seafood industry to discuss issues surrounding smarter management of global fisheries resources. The all-day program featured a wide range of speakers and panelists.
“We attend the symposium to share our experiences advocating for more sustainable seafood in North America, both our successes and our failures,” Bigelow said. “Hopefully, that knowledge allows the sustainable seafood movement in Japan to grow more quickly and avoid some of the issues we encountered over the last 20 years.”
According to Bigelow, the closest parallel to the Seafood Watch Buyers Guide in Japan is the Sailors for the Sea Blue Seafood Guide.