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News

Sea Pact Grantee Update: Building Bridges in the Gulf of Mexico - Commercial Fishermen and Aquaculture Experts Come Together as Partners

12/16/2022

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Aquaculture and commercial fishing leaders meet in Biloxi, Mississippi (photo courtesy of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders' Alliance).
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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  • Incomplete, outdated, and/or outright misinformation often drive the public narrative into a negative space.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.

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Sea Pact joins other pre-competitive efforts in calling for more effective fisher safety initiatives.

9/6/2022

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Fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world and improving fisher safety is of critical importance to all involved in the seafood industry. This week, five of the largest collaborations in the seafood sector have come together as a meta-coalition to support efforts to improve fisher safety.  Those efforts include supporting continued and consistent data collection and analysis of fatalities in the industry, and actions to significantly reduce the risk of future incidents.  The information will help understand the drivers behind the unacceptably high death rates, and then to design solutions to those drivers.
The safety of fishers has been a problem for the wild capture seafood industry for many years. Research by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1999, and subsequently by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), estimated that annual fisher deaths were in the region of 24,000 and 32,000 respectively, or 65 and 87 deaths per day.
However, new research from The Pew Charitable Trusts, in conjunction with the Fish Safety Foundation, estimates that global fisher mortality rates are actually three to four times higher than these previous assessments.
The FAO has included the topic of fisher safety in its agenda for the upcoming Committee on Fisheries meeting,  and this meta-coalition are supporting calls for a global mechanism for reporting fatalities alongside targeted and effective safety initiatives based on the data generated, to make the work of fishing safer.
We hope that our intervention will help to ensure that this topic receives the required level of attention by fishing nations and other stakeholders.
“Fishing is and always has been a dangerous occupation but we can do better to reduce the current rate of fatal incidents. We must all work together to improve fisher safety and reduce the number of lives lost at sea.  We have delivered a statement to the FAO Committee on Fisheries this week on behalf of multiple industry companies to support the development of a global mechanism to report fatalities at sea.  That, in turn, will help understand the drivers behind the dangers and design solutions to improve safety at-sea.” Herman Wisse – Executive Director GSSI
The five groups releasing the statement are Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS), the Global Tuna Alliance (GTA), the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST), Sea Pact, and the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative (GSSI). Taken together, these collaborations include over 150 companies from across the seafood value chain, making this one of the largest seafood industry calls for action on record.
The statement notes:
As a coalition of seafood entities, we are committed to ensuring that the seafood we catch, grow, buy, and sell is responsibly produced without activities such as IUU fishing or modern slavery.  As part of these commitments, we recognise that IUU fishing and modern slavery expose fishers to unsafe and harmful working conditions.   We have aligned with FAO and the Ocean Panel, along with others, to advocate for the ratification and effective implementation of FAO Port State Measures Agreement and devised other measures to address IUU fishing and modern slavery, which will help to improve fishers’ safety.
Building on the existing national reporting systems already in place, we support the development of a global mechanism throughout the seafood sector that can establish a data collection scheme and repository on global fisher mortality incidents to help with analyses of loss of life in the fishing industry, leading to improved safety initiative development and implementation.
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Sea Pact and Seafood Legacy Announce Collaboration

6/7/2022

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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.
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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.
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Welcoming Sam Grimley as Executive Director

1/20/2022

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We are pleased to announce that Sam Grimley will join Sea Pact as Executive Director on February 1st, 2022. Sam has served as a sustainability advisor to Sea Pact since its inception in 2013 and brings a wealth of experience in sustainability and engaging diverse networks of seafood supply chain stakeholders through pre-competitive collaboration efforts.  Sam’s hiring comes as Sea Pact prepares to finalize and implement a plan of strategic growth in grant programs, outreach and partnerships. 

Sam has family roots in commercial fishing in Rhode Island and has been dedicated to driving sustainability efforts across the global seafood landscape for his entire career. As he joins Sea Pact, Sam is transitioning from his current role as Deputy Division Director/Markets Program Director for North America at Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP). During his nine-year tenure at SFP, Sam oversaw implementation of SFP’s 5-year industry leadership strategy, which included strengthening industry engagement within SFP’s supply chain roundtables and other pre-competitive efforts.

Prior to joining SFP in 2013, Sam worked in the Sustainable Seafood Program at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) where he developed and managed GMRI’s Sustainable Seafood Culinary Partners program to promote local seafood through restaurants and food service efforts. Sam has a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science from University of New Hampshire and a Master of Arts degree in Marine Affairs from University of Rhode Island.


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Celebrating Rob Johnson's Tenure at Sea Pact

12/23/2021

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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.
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  • Sea Pact
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