September 26, 2007

 

FAO pushes for "greener fish"

 

 

The multi-billion seafood and fishery industries should adapt for "environmentally friendly fish" despite intensified global demand, the Food and Agriculture Organization said on Tuesday (September 25).

 

During opening remarks made to industry representatives attending the 2007 Seafood Industry Congress (September 25-27, in Dublin), Grimur Valdimarsson, Director of FAO's Fishing Industries Division, said that the need for seafood producers to guarantee environmental performance is unavoidable.

 

He said the push towards sustainable fisheries is not just coming from government or environmental groups, but from the market itself, noting that major seafood retailers like Unilever, Tesco, Walmart and Asda have already committed to putting on their shelves only fish that was harvested or raised.

 

Producers should assure retailers and consumers that their fish were not taken from overexploited stocks, farmed in ponds where mangroves once stood, or caught in nets without turtle-saving excluder devices installed.

 

To achieve this, monitoring fishing activities via tracking systems, labels and similar mechanisms is necessary. There are already a number of initiatives under way that seek to do this, established either by seafood retailers or public interest organizations. While expressing concern over the proliferation of diverse and competing efforts, Valdimarsson stressed that, overall, the trend is a positive one.

 

"Complying with these new imperatives is technically extremely difficult, and so the challenge facing industry right now is finding ways of doing so that are both adequate and economically feasible," Valdimarsson acknowledged.

 

The capture fisheries sector should draw lessons from the last 25 years of food safety assurance in other sectors, which moved largely from being a government-run activity to one managed by industry itself within a government-established framework and subject to spot verification.

 

Seafood producers have been wrestling with a similar problem for years now, which could help.

 

Valdimarsson said producers have already put into place internal systems to ensure that they are providing seafood that is fresh, safe to eat, and of the highest quality -- which is what today's consumers demand.

 

Resource-strapped developing countries will have a particularly hard time making the transition to fully certifying their fisheries.

 

However, Valdimarssom explained they've already been struggling mightily to comply with health and safety regulations on fish imports put into place by importing countries in the developed world.

 

Helping resolve this problem is an issue of particular importance to FAO, he said, adding that the retailers shaping market trends have a responsibility to help suppliers in the developing world cope.

 

The FAO and other international development organizations working on fisheries and aquaculture will need new resources to help the developing world's fisheries sector adapt, he said.

 

The widespread practice of granting open or nearly-open access to fishing grounds is another challenge.

 

According to Valdimarsson, under the open access regime, fishing is an extremely competitive, zero sum game: if a fishermen doesn't land a fish, his competitor will, leaving little incentive to conserve the resource, which results to overfishing. Thus, fishermen have a vested interest in not revealing what they've been doing.

 

That practice must change, Valdimarsson points out, because the emerging paradigm requires the industry to be able to say exactly where, when and how a fish was caught. Only fishermen who hold clear rights and are not obliged to outfish a large group of competitors will feel secure enough to operate with that level of transparency.