Planet over Profit

Defining sustainable aquaculture and fisheries practices is a significant challenge that is currently being undertaken by many NGOs, seafood buyers, and producers worldwide. The goal is to ensure that interested consumers and businesses can purchase seafood from sustainable sources, thusly reducing the negative environmental impact of their seafood choices. However, while defining sustainable production is a critical first piece of the puzzle, ensuring that the products consumers and businesses actually acquire are indeed what they intended to purchase is the second.

Seafood fraud, or the mislabeling of one seafood product for another, has been widely reported. In one study, researchers tested fish labeled as “red snapper” and found that 77% of the products they tested were, in fact, different species. A similar situation was found in the case of grouper in restaurants along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Such scams occur everywhere and have been fairly successful because there is greater supply of more inexpensive and lesser-known species than those perhaps desired by consumers. The reality is that the average person’s palette cannot tell the difference among certain fish species.

Recently, while in Bangkok, Thailand I passed several restaurants selling seafood, which loudly touted that they offer “red snapper.” Always curious, I checked it out for myself and found that their “red snapper” was actually red tilapia – a species that is farmed all throughout Asia, while real red snapper is usually caught in the wild. Amusingly, the fish was even labeled with a tag with the name of the farm where it was produced. Such indications of origin are, however, not always so clear.

This suggests that either A) the people selling the red snapper tilapia are themselves running the scam or B) giving the benefit of the doubt to the friendly restaurateurs, they do not fully understand the production chain. Either one of these scenarios leads to the same conclusion: education about seafood sourcing is necessary for consumers and, perhaps more importantly, for those who buy and sell seafood on a daily basis. However, understanding the source of the products one buys can be a daunting task, especially if there are not trustworthy mechanisms in place to help minimize the burden of differentiating the good from the bad and the legitimate from the fraudulent.

Increasing the traceability and transparency of the seafood industry is critical to curbing the frequency of seafood mislabeling and, moreover, to achieving the greater goal of successfully reshaping aquaculture production to using more sustainable methods. If we do not find a way to do so, efforts to improve seafood production practices could be undermined by green washers (the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly) looking to make money off of false marketing, selling products that are not what they claim to be. The solution may rest on the forming of an alliance between NGOs and industry to lobby the government to secure legislation and enforcement for seafood traceability that would likely be mutually beneficial for both parties as well as well-meaning consumers.

Well it’s been a while and I have had a busy several months, but it’s definitely time to move this blog forward.

I am now in Asia, where I will be roaming about for the next several months, trying to learn more about the aquaculture seafood supply that enters the US and Canada. In the US alone, over 80% of the seafood that is consumed is imported. As someone who spends his life trying to learn about how to make seafood supplies sustainable in order to ensure healthy food and a healthy planet, an understanding of the supply chain and how it works is critical. Furthermore, China alone produces approximately 70% of global aquaculture supplies and the rest of Asia produces the vast majority of the remaining 30%. This means that any understanding of the global picture for aquaculture production must encompass China and the rest of Asia. It was for these reasons that I packed up my suitcase and went on a road trip for an indefinite period of time to Southeast Asia beginning in October 2009.

The opportunity and idea for this trip was generated by my involvement in the Shrimp Aquaculture Dialogue (more on this in a future posting). The process is seeking to develop performance-based standards (i.e. not best management practices) that will ensure ecological and social sustainability for the aquaculture industry. With this type of process, consolidating input from as many stakeholders as possible is critical. The process seeks to create these standards in order to form a definition of sustainability for shrimp aquaculture production that can be used for certification and by major seafood buyers interested in sourcing sustainable seafood for their business. For the Shrimp Aquaculture Industry, 85% of production comes from Asia, making Asian shrimp producers a very important stakeholder to engage for the Shrimp Aquaculture Dialogue. This trip will involve meetings, site visits, and hopefully some key insights that I plan to share with you via this blog, so stay tuned!