​



​






Aquaculture and commercial fishing leaders meet in Biloxi, Mississippi (photo courtesy of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders' Alliance).
​
Eric Brazer, Deputy Director with the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders' Alliance provided the following update on their project :

Proactive, conservation-minded commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico have come together with leaders in the offshore aquaculture industry to forge a collaborative path forward, and the initial results are incredibly promising.  
 
With critical support from SeaPact, the Reef Fish Conservation and Education Foundation – a partner of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance – brought together six commercial fishing leaders from four Gulf states for a meeting in Biloxi, Mississippi in October 2022 with four experts in the aquaculture world including Dr. Kelly Lucas (University of Southern Mississippi), Paul Zajicek (National Aquaculture Association), Andrew Richard (NOAA Fisheries), and Dave Donaldson (Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission). 
 
This working group met to share information, ask questions, and establish working relationships to tackle mutual threats and opportunities for our nation’s coastal communities, the U.S. seafood supply chain, and the American public’s access to domestic sustainable seafood.  Common themes that emerged included but were not limited to: 

• Prioritization of the promotion of domestic seafood over imported seafood.
• Increased domestic seafood production will be necessary to meet and promote increased seafood consumption and demand in the United States.
• Successful seafood businesses depend on the ability to make money, not just growing/harvesting of fish.
• The lack of property rights (e.g., for aquaculture farms and for commercial fishing individual fishing quotas) is a hurdle to long-term stable business planning.
• Incomplete, outdated, and/or outright misinformation often drive the public narrative into a negative space.
• Complex regulatory environments often impede seafood industry progress.
• Working waterfronts are critical to the success and longevity of both industries. 

 
Establishing and building on shared principles like sustainable domestic seafood; robust food security systems; durable working waterfronts; and the humanizing belief that we are more alike than different; this workgroup engaged energetically in a very constructive, truthful, and heartening conversation that set the stage for future collaboration.  Everyone wholeheartedly agreed that more opportunities for collaboration and communication would be helpful to each of these components of our nation’s collective seafood industry.
 
This was a great first step towards bringing our nation’s domestic seafood providers together and we look forward to working with these experts and others to grow this effort and develop a larger, more comprehensive program in 2023.

Sea Pact and Seafood Legacy are excited to announce a collaboration to support the design and development of a pre-competitive collaboration for Japan's seafood industry that further enables collective industry engagement in sustainability issues. Over the course of Sea Pact's nine year history,  the organization has accumulated knowledge and approaches that have resulted in an effective and impactful industry-led collaborative model that includes project funding and collective industry action for addressing seafood sustainability.  Seafood Legacy is interested in how a Sea Pact-type model can be designed and adopted by several key Japanese seafood industry partners in a manner of creating synergy with the Japan Responsible Seafood Roundtable, a pre-competitive business platform that Seafood Legacy is preparing to launch with the market leaders.

Through the collaboration, Sea Pact will share relevant information and lessons learned from its own model with Seafood Legacy and Japanese seafood industry members to support their efforts to establish a pre-competitive collaborative entity in Japan.   Sea Pact, Seafood Legacy and participating industry members will also jointly identify areas of alignment on sustainability priorities and goals that will be the focus of further cooperation between Sea Pact and the forthcoming collaboration in Japan.  Sea Pact and Seafood Legacy's recently signed memorandum of understanding includes additional details on the collaboration.
​  
Sea Pact aims to establish similar collaborations with stakeholders in other markets to enable mid-supply chain companies across the globe to collaborate and address broad sustainability challenges.

Happy holidays from Sea Pact! As we approach the end of 2021, we wanted to share that this time also marks the end of Rob Johnson’s five-year tenure as the Managing Director of Sea Pact.

Since coming on board with Sea Pact in 2016, our ten member companies have come to know and value Rob for his knowledge and experience in the NGO community, as well as his commitment to driving continuous improvement of our fisheries. As Managing Director, Rob showed dedication, hard work, and professionalism as a representative of Sea Pact. He was our biggest cheerleader in encouraging precompetitive collaboration in the seafood industry.

Rob played an integral role in the development and growth of Sea Pact, especially in building relationships and securing outside funding. With Rob’s direction, we have been able to distribute the funding to support projects aligned with our mission. He made us proud when Sea Pact became part of the Conservation Alliance and Rob was an incredible representative on countless conference panels around the world. In the midst of the seafood industry’s COVID-19 struggles, Rob was at the helm of Sea Pact, organizing weekly virtual check-in meetings where each member shared their experiences and best practices to challenges our companies were facing.

​We are very appreciative of Rob’s hard work leading Sea Pact over the past five years and he will be missed. We wish him the greatest happiness and success in his future.