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PEW Charitable Trusts & Global Tuna Alliance Collaborate at IATTC Meeting
Along with fellow Sea Pact member Hamish Walker from Seattle Fish, I had the honor of attending the annual Commission meeting for the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) hosted by the Canadian government in Victoria, BC. Neither of us had attended a regional fisheries management organization (RFMO) meeting before. It was an extremely enlightening experience.
The IATTC is the RFMO responsible for the conservation and management of tuna and tuna -like species, associated species and their ecosystems, throughout the Eastern Pacific Ocean, from Canada, in the north, to Chile, in the South. Industry is always being asked to sign letters of support for proposals and management strategies prior to RFMO meetings to encourage the delegates to improve and/or progress management measures. As representatives of the sustainable seafood industry, we often wonder if we are supporting the right initiatives on behalf of our customers, suppliers, and fishing communities. In the weeks leading up to the meeting, we both did as much as we could to prepare ourselves. The GTA organized a couple virtual meetings and went over the GTA’s recommendations for the proposals to be presented at the meeting. Hamish and I also met with the Assistant Regional Administrator of the Sustainable Fisheries Division of NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region and his team that represent the US Delegation at the Commission meetings prior to attending. Even with all that preparation we were still not sure what we were in for.
At the 101st meeting of the IATTC the seating in conference room was set up in a square with the IATTC staff including the Director, Chair, and Scientific Advisory Committee at the front of the room and the other three sides lined with member countries’ delegates and the NGO community representatives lining the back row. There appeared to be no more than 3 people at most representing each country in the room and only one per NGO. I quickly became aware that each delegation has an army of staff behind the scenes supporting them. After EVERY representative on each delegation introduced themselves, there were presentations of the proposals submitted by the members, presentations from the Scientific Advisory Committee, recommendations by the Commission staff, and lots of talk of the budget. I could go into greater detail, but you would quickly become disinterested. For more captivating recaps see Senior Program Associate of International Fisheries Conservation for The Ocean Foundation, John Bohorquez’s post and the GTA’s report. I personally needed to experience an RFMO meeting to really understand the inner workings. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes discussions at breaks and editing of shared google documents to revise proposals for greater agreement. It is very impressive to see how various countries and cultures can unite to make decisions that affect so many livelihoods, and on the flip side, how countries will adamantly stand their ground and oppose proposals pushing for further revisions.
The market sector needs to get more involved, and that could mean attending meetings to get a better idea of the system. There are also opportunities to participate in intersessional meetings and for further advocacy. Hamish spoke at a reception in front of Commission members with Monterey Bay Aquarium, Costa Rica’s head of delegation, The Nature Conservancy, and the Ecology Action Center on the importance of electronic monitoring for an assured supply, and how our customers are demanding more sustainable seafood every day. He pointed out that industry is putting its money where its mouth is, including Sea Pact’s recently funded projects with Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Fisheries Electronic Monitoring on developing and accessing electronic monitoring technology as a tool in the Gulf of Mexico commercial reef fish fishery, as well as Seafood and Fisheries Emerging Technology’s effort to supporting the regional adoption of electronic monitoring systems through a community of practice and innovation.
Special thanks to PEW Charitable Trusts and Global Tuna Alliance for their support in making our trip and participation in the IATTC meeting possible.
Stacy Schultz is the Director of Marketing & Sustainability Coordinator for Fortune Fish and Gourmet (a founding Sea Pact member). She contributed this blog after attending her first-ever RFMO meeting along with Hamish Walker, Chief Sustainability Officer at Seattle Fish (also founding Sea Pact member).
Sea Pact Grantee Update: Seafood Literacy for Retailers by Barton Seaver, powered by Rouxbe
Barton Seaver, Founder and Chief Education Officer, SeafoodLiteracy.com, provided the following update:
I’m so pleased to receive a Sea Pact grant in 2022-2023 for the collaborative creation of our online educational program “Seafood Literacy for Retailers.” This 4-hour program was adapted from our original Seafood Literacy program and tweaked with input from Sea Pact members. The resulting program is a great tool to teach counter staff needed information as well as to learn from them how and what they most need to learn.
Retail seafood counter staff associates are frequently under-prepared to answer questions for the consumer, partially because consumers themselves are often misinformed. Initial surveys we have conducted to gauge interest and need for this education indicated that a majority of counter staff we queried believe fresh to be superior to frozen, and wild to be better quality than farmed across the board. Many also do not eat seafood themselves and have little to no knowledge of how to prepare seafood.
Through proven video education pedagogy, this program will give frontline seafood representatives better understanding of the importance of sustainable sourcing, how to prepare and cook seafood, and build their confidence in selling seafood - a skillset we call Seafood Literacy. With the confidence and competence to take full advantage of all the unique qualities of fish, shellfish and sea veggies have to offer, retailers may earn more customer loyalty and create demand for a greater diversity of species and market forms.
The course uses a combination of learning modalities including text and video, as well as self-assessments. We cover topics such as why sustainable seafood matters, sustainability from sourcing to serving, types of fishing and aquaculture methods, how to talk to customers about seafood, understanding seafood culinary categories, and basic seafood cooking techniques.
We recently launched the program and are currently enrolling retail seafood counter associates into the online, mobile-accessible course. Our goal in this beta phase is to have 100 Sea Pact members and customers users complete the course. Users will have 30 days to complete the program and post-course surveys. We will present a final report highlighting pre- and post-course questionnaires and individual self-reported responses as well as completion rates.
For more information check out the program at https://seafoodretailer.rouxbe.com/ (Use access code: eatseafood for complimentary access) or contact Katy at katy@forcodandcountry.com
Sea Pact Grantee Update: Building Bridges in the Gulf of Mexico - Commercial Fishermen and Aquaculture Experts Come Together as Partners
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.
Aquaculture and commercial fishing leaders meet in Biloxi, Mississippi (photo courtesy of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders' Alliance).
Sea Pact Calls For More Effective Fisher Safety Initiatives
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.”
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.
Sea Pact and Seafood Legacy Announce Collaboration
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.