Saving Seafood

Friend of the Sea calls on COFI to address regulation of sustainable seafood claims

February 9, 2021 — The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations’ Committee on Fisheries (COFI) met this month for its 34th session, covering topics relating to the state of the world’s sustainable fisheries and aquaculture operations.

A subsidiary body of the FAO, COFI is the only inter-governmental forum where FAO members convene to review and consider the global issues and challenges related to fisheries and aquaculture, according to the body’s website. The collective provides periodic global recommendations and policy advice, such as its Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Compass Group PLC Joins GSSI

January 20, 2021 — The following was released by the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative:

The Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative is pleased to announce that food service company Compass Group has joined GSSI as a Funding Partner.

Compass Group is a global leader in food services and provides great food and support services to millions of people around the world, every day. The group is committed to maintaining a strong agenda on sourcing responsibly.

“Compass are committed to buying more and more sustainably sourced fish and seafood from supply chains that are resilient and operated responsibly. Our goal is for 50% of our fish and seafood to be certified sustainable. In 2020, we reached this goal across our top 10 countries, and are now working to achieve the same across all of our top 20 countries. GSSI brings much needed clarity around the various global certification schemes and their equivalence, enabling consistent and lasting positive impact for the industry, both environmentally and socially. Our new partnership with GSSI will help us accelerate progress towards achieving our goal,” said Chris McCrystal, Global Head of Food Safety & Responsible Sourcing, Compass Group PLC.

Read the full release here

Sysco tightens seafood sustainability policy to require more MSC- and ASC-certified seafood

January 14, 2021 — Foodservice distributor Sysco will significantly increase its purchases of certified responsible seafood by 2025, as part of an enhanced commitment with its partner, World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The Houston, Texas, U.S.A.-based distributor will also expand its current responsible sourcing program for its U.S. broadline business to include sourcing for its specialty and Canadian broadline business, Sysco said in a press release. It is adding new commitments to prohibit the sale of endangered species, advance its traceability work, and help address deforestation.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The science of sustainable seafood, explained

January 13, 2021 — The following was released by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Commercial fishing is vital to global food production. Wild-caught fish contain every essential amino acid, require no land or freshwater, and are a renewable resource when managed sustainably. In addition to providing access to healthy, low-impact protein, the seafood industry is worth over a trillion dollars annually and employs 40 million people—ensuring its sustainability is vital to economies all over the world. We explain seafood industry regulations in our section on fishery management—but first, the fundamental key to understanding sustainable seafood is grasping the science of catching fish.

Fisheries are composed of fish stocks and the fishing fleet that catches them. A fish stock is simply a harvested population. It refers to one specific species in one particular place, like Gulf of Maine cod. A fishery is the intersection of a stock (or group of stocks) and the means of harvest. Fishing fleets can use several different methods to capture fish, each method describes the fishery and guides management.

A fishery is sustainable when the amount harvested does not compromise future harvests.

Fishery science is the process that answers that question, primarily through stock assessments. A stock assessment uses several different kinds of data to understand the health of a stock and determine how much can be fished. You can think of the data as the A,B,Cs of stock assessments – abundance, biology, and catch.

  • Abundance is how many fish are in the population; estimates of abundance are made based on samples that are gathered using various methods.
  • Sampling can also collect biological data such as: age and length from which we can estimate levels of natural mortality and fishing mortality. Together, these data help estimate the reproductive rate of a population, which in turn allows us to predict how many fish will be around next year.
    • During sampling, environmental data like temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and other ecological variables are also collected.
  • Catch data are our historical records of how many or what weight of fish was caught during a calendar year or a fishing season.

Read the full release here

Researchers offer approaches for the sustainable expansion of the U.S. seafood industry

January 8, 2021 — The “Executive Order on Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth,” issued by the Trump administration in May 2020, lays out a plan to expand the U.S. seafood industry, especially aquaculture, and enhance American seafood competitiveness in the global market.

The goals of the directive are focused largely on growth and expansion of the industry, which includes wild-caught fisheries and farm-raised products, as well as recreation, processing and other industries that rely on fishing.

“The seafood industry in general is worth about $200 billion and accounts for 2 million jobs in the United States,” said Halley E. Froehlich, a professor of fisheries and aquaculture at UC Santa Barbara, who with her colleagues finds that the executive order “ends up being a complicated and opaque ask,” given the complexity of the seafood industry and the headwinds it has been experiencing of late.

“We started having some deep conversations about policy implications and what they meant relative to some massive disruptions,” she said.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Joint Packard and Walton Family Foundation report identifies five key seafood sustainability focus areas

January 4, 2021 — A new report from the Packard and Walton Family Foundations has identified five key areas of focus that the seafood industry would need to build upon to develop demand in emerging sustainability markets in Latin America and Asia, Walton Family Foundation (WFF) Senior Program Officer Teresa Ish said during the Latin American Summit for Fishing and Aquaculture Sustainability.

Ish – who manages grants for WFF’s Environment Program, which leverages the power of the supply chain to advocate for more sustainable fisheries – was referring to the new report, “The Strategy Behind Sustainable Seafood Philanthropy – A Briefing for Industry from the Packard and Walton Family Foundations,” which was a joint evaluation of the two foundations’ Global Seafood Markets strategies. The report reviews the progress made over the past twenty years in the global sustainable seafood movement, and identifies the challenges that lie ahead.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Seafood sustainability foundation reports most world tuna stocks in good shape

December 14, 2020 — About 87 percent of the worldwide commercial catch of tuna is coming from stocks seen at healthy levels of abundance, although some regional stocks including Pacific bluefin are overfished, the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation says in a new status report.

Based on findings by regional fishery management organizations though October 2020, the summary by the foundation – a cooperative program involving scientists, the tuna industry, and the World Wildlife Fund – breaks down 10 percent of the world catch coming from overfished stocks and 3 percent from stocks “at an intermediate level of abundance.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Friend of the Sea revises aquaculture, fish welfare certification standards

December 11, 2020 — Milan, Italy-based nonprofit Friend of the Sea (FoS) is revising its Sustainable Aquaculture and Fish Welfare certification standards and their respective audit guidance, with the aim of strengthening sustainability and farm management criteria.

The revision process opened for public consultation on 4 December, 2020, with comment invited from stakeholders and interested parties until 1 February 2021.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ISSF: IATTC Fails to Preserve Tuna Conservation and FAD Measures at Annual Meeting

December 8, 2020 — The following was released by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation:

The following release was updated on December 9, 2020 to reflect changes made by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation:

Last month, ISSF and its partners appealed to the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) to, at a minimum, act to ensure its current measures on tuna conservation and management do not lapse and stay in place for 2021. ISSF outlined its science-based recommendations to IATTC in our position statement.

Unfortunately, IATTC ended its Nov. 30–Dec. 4 virtual Commission meeting without keeping crucial “status quo” measures in place:

Despite the clear scientific advice to, at a minimum, keep these provisions intact, the objection of one party blocked their extension. As a result, the sustainability of the region’s tropical tuna fisheries and marine ecosystems is now at risk.

IATTC’s inaction is a breakdown of its responsibility to ensure the long-term sustainable use of Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO) tuna resources. In response to the Commission’s flagrant failings, ISSF urges all IATTC parties to exercise restraint and take the precautionary approach by voluntarily continuing to apply the previously in-effect provisions throughout 2021. Doing so will help keep fishing mortality at a level consistent with IATTC objectives.

ISSF calls upon IATTC to urgently organize an emergency session of the Commission early in 2021 to put in place binding conservation measures that will apply immediately.

We recognize that pandemic lockdowns and travel limitations have made substantive discussions and consensus-building especially difficult this year. But RFMOs and national governments will remain in this situation for the foreseeable future — and they need to adapt, as other organizations worldwide have, to the new reality. The virtual meeting format does not prevent or excuse them from ensuring detailed, inclusive discussions and taking decisive action to protect global tuna stocks and their marine ecosystems.

World’s biggest ocean sustainability initiative signed by 14 countries

December 2, 2020 — A new initiative designed to lessen humanity’s negative impacts on the world’s oceans has been signed by 14 countries.

Several of the countries belonging to the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, a consortium of ocean-dependent countries founded in 2018 to initiate action to improve global marine sustainability efforts, announced the Transformations for a Sustainable Ocean Economy: A Vision for Protection, Production and Prosperity initiative on Tuesday, 1 December.

Read the full story at Seafood Source