Sustainability is one of those concepts, like freedom and world peace, that we automatically accept as being good. But it’s turning out that achieving sustainability may just be as hard as the other two! While efforts to deal with sustainability issues like climate change seem to be stalled, we are making some progress with seafood sustainability. This progress is important.
Quite simply, having our seafood come from “sustainable” sources means that we will have the highest possible supply for the long term. By contrast, an unsustainable seafood supply results when we take more fish out of the sea than nature puts back, or when our fishing practices destroy the habitats fish need to survive. Although these destructive practices might mean having more fish in the short term, it results in having fewer fish down the road. We need the long-term balance that comes from having sustainable fisheries to ensure a continuing high level of supply.
Amazingly, we only recently started dealing with the issue of sustainability. Many people, even scientists, thought that our fish supply was infinite. But by the 1980s it was becoming clear that this was not the case. Our fishing methods became so efficient that we could catch more fish than were being replaced through reproduction.
Our thinking on what constitutes a sustainable fishery was clarified in 1995. The United Nations convened a conference that resulted in the development of a Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Using the U.N. guidelines, independent organizations such as the Marine Stewardship Council, Global Trust, and Friend of Sea have enacted specific standards that fisheries need to comply with to be certified as sustainable.
Partly based on customer demand, but more from a business to business perspective, many retailers and food service companies have started to “green” their seafood offerings by putting in place goals and systems to obtain their seafood from certified sustainable sources. Wal-Mart was the first major company to do this, and many other companies have done the same.
But only about 12 percent of the world’s fisheries are certified as sustainable. The requirements to become certified are rigid, and include the need for a management and enforcement structure that is typically out of reach for fisheries in developing countries where government institutions are often inadequate. And the process of becoming certified can be very expensive. You can see why so few of the world’s fisheries are certified as sustainable.
If we accept that the goal should be to have our seafood come from sustainable sources we can either compete for the 12 percent that is already certified or we can try to figure out a way to transition more of the world’s fisheries to sustainability. This is where the seafood industry can play a role; that’s starting to occur.
As an example of what industry can do my employer, Phillips Foods, recently started selling a line of albacore tuna sourced from Samoa. As part of our responsible sourcing policy, we first evaluated the fishery by examining the status of the tuna stocks relative to overfishing, ensuring that the fishing methods were environmentally sound. We also verified there was a management structure we could build on. We are working with the Samoan government and with the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), a non-governmental organization with expertise in this area, to do a more formal assessment of the fishery to determine if there are any issues that would prevent it from being recognized as sustainable.
If improvements to the fishery and its management are necessary, we are willing to participate in and support the work to transition this fishery to sustainability. Earlier this year we started contributing three cents per pound from all of our fish sales to further support SFP’s global sustainability initiatives, and we continue to encourage other seafood providers to follow suit.
Industry has a real economic interest in seeing the fisheries they depend on become and stay sustainable. We are making progress, but have a long way to go. But for the seafood industry, supporting fisheries as they transition to sustainability is not only the right thing to do, it’s a good investment.
Ed Rhodes is a vice president for Phillips Foods in Baltimore where he leads both their responsible seafood sourcing and aquaculture development programs. Rhodes is a fisheries biologist and his 40-year career has been split about equally between Federal service with NOAA Fisheries and the private sector.