Reframing the sustainable seafood narrative / by Francisco Blaha

I been criticised for many years now on my opinions on ecolabels and private certifications. I don't object to their alleged objectives (of course we all want sustainable and safe seafood) but mostly their implementation methods and the fact that they are a just one more business with standards drafted by the rich, but paid by the poor. I said once that I don't participate in that whole “certifications world” because I think they are “at best hypocrisy and at worst neo-colonialism. I know is quite extreme, but it passes the message… furthermore I’m not an academic that write nice papers and has the “credibility” of universities or institutions.

Yet, I correspond with them, mostly answering questions “from the field” perspective. So is nice to see my opinions also expressed into wider perspective with much nice words and arguments in some scientific papers written by much smarter people than me. 

L1080238.jpg

 This is the case of this paper, written by quite a few well know authors even if I only corresponded with 3 of them (Michael F. Tlusty, Megan Bailey, and Simon Bush). I’m actually sometimes envious of academics with salary jobs, as they get paid to go to congresses, teach, write articles like this one, while I come from a more operational background and as a self-employed scientist, writing papers and going to congresses is a cost that is hard to justify… I wish there was a halfway path.

The abstract already set the tone, so quote it and also some of the parts that resonate the most to me, but as I always read the original! (if you don't have access via institutions, there are “grey” alternatives, or better ask the authors for a copy.

Abstract
The dominant sustainable seafood narrative is one where developed world markets catalyze practice improvements by fisheries and aquaculture producers that enhance ocean health. The narrow framing of seafood sustainability in terms of aquaculture or fisheries management and ocean health has contributed to the omission of these important food production systems from the discussion on global food system sustainability. This omission is problematic. Seafood makes critical contributions to food and nutrition security, particularly in low income countries, and is often a more sustainable and nutrient rich source of animal sourced-food than terrestrial meat production. We argue that to maximize the positive contributions that seafood can make to sustainable food systems, the conventional narratives that prioritize seafood's role in promoting ‘ocean health’ need to be reframed and cover a broader set of environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. The focus of the narrative also needs to move from a producer-centric to a ‘whole chain’ perspective that includes greater inclusion of the later stages with a focus on food waste, by-product utilization and consumption. Moreover, seafood should not be treated as a single aggregated item in sustainability assessments. Rather, it should be recognized as a highly diverse set of foods, with variable environmental impacts, edible yield rates and nutritional profiles. Clarifying discussions around seafood will help to deepen the integration of fisheries and aquaculture into the global agenda on sustainable food production, trade and consumption, and assist governments, private sector actors, NGOs and academics alike in identifying where improvements can be made.

1. Introduction
In this paper we argue the sustainable seafood narrative needs to be reframed to more accurately represent the present and future role of seafood in global food systems. Doing so can create greater coherence between state and NGO attempts to steer seafood sustainability. Sustainability in a broad sense is operationally defined as production that balances socio-economic benefits while maintaining environmental integrity now and into the future (Asche et al., 2018; Kuhlman and Farrington, 2010; Tlusty and Thorsen, 2016). However, the study and measure of sustainability is often reduced to a narrow, and usually environmental, single-factor dimensionality (Béné et al., 2019, Fig. 1), such as stock status and management effectiveness, or habitat impacts of fish farming. Such reduction opens up opportunity for strategic positioning, where the sustainability claims will differ based on the definitions and metrics specific to NGO, industry, and / or national interest groups. The political nature of such decisions means that completely overcoming such conflicts is unlikely. Nevertheless reframing some of the misleading narratives that shape the choices of different sustain-ability metrics can help redirect sustainability agendas (and their me-trics) to be more aligned and ultimately more effective. In the rest of this paper we reframe three key misleading narratives for sustainable seafood. First, seafood's role in creating a healthy ocean needs to be reframed into a vision that integrates seafood sustainability within a broader global food system framework (Fig. 1). Second, the focus of improvement needs to be reframed beyond the narrow scope of producer practices and extended to broad issues that may arise at other or multiple nodes of the value chain (Fig. 1). Third, ‘seafood’ is a broad category, and this needs to be acknowledged as a heterogeneous cate-gory of food with equally heterogeneous environmental, nutritional and social impacts. The rest of this perspective paper discusses the role, focus, and categories of seafood, emphasizing how they need to re-framed to best integrate fisheries and aquaculture products into the global agenda on sustainable food production, trade and consumption.

2. Avoid the ‘healthy oceans’ trap
Ocean health is a global public environmental good. Although marine fish stocks and a large portion of aquaculture are dependent on healthy oceans (Kleisner et al., 2013; Naylor et al., 2000), it is un-realistic for the seafood narrative to create a direct causal link between the implementation of better practices by fishers and fish farmers alone and improved ocean health. We argue that framing seafood Second, the ocean health narrative draws attention away from a suite of non-ocean-health issues, including the linkages between aquatic and terrestrial food production systems and impacts from freshwater aquaculture. The most prominent of these are aquatic-terrestrial linkages are through feed. Agricultural products are used in aquaculture (Froehlich et al., 2018; Newton and Little, 2018; Troell et al., 2014), and conversely, marine ingredients provide inputs for terrestrial live-stock production (Shepherd and Jackson, 2013). Similarities in land feed-crop use, water use, and effluent impacts mean that fed aqua-culture has more in common with terrestrial animal agriculture than with capture fisheries (Roberts et al., 2015). Fuller recognition of the links to terrestrial systems and their environmental implications will require NGOs and policy makers to move beyond ‘ocean health’ perspectives. As we argue in the following section, this will also require a more systemic understanding of seafood sustainability that extends far beyond the practices of fishers and fish farmers alone. sustain-ability primarily in terms of ‘ocean health’ can blur the role of seafood in global food systems in two ways.

First, NGO performance indicators largely target the effects of fishing and fish farming that include unregulated and unreported fishing, destructive fishing methods, the conversion/loss of coastal habitat, and use of marine ingredients in aquaculture (see for e.g. Agnew et al., 2009; Naylor et al., 2009). While critical, the ocean has a myriad of increasing threats beyond, but impactful to, seafood including but not limited to dead zones, plastic litter, acidification and climate change, and changes in ocean circulation (Vázquez-Rowe, 2020). We argue that the sustainable seafood movement, and all its actors, needs to broaden its scope regarding sustainability dimensions included in standards, assessments and campaigns, in order to substantively contribute to ocean health and food systems.

3. Improvements throughout the entire value chain
The sustainable seafood narrative has been overly narrow in its approach by offloading action for improvement on the shoulders of producers (Bailey et al., 2018; Bush, 2017). This productionist bias (Fouilleux et al., 2017) places a major burden on fishers and farmers frequently located in low-income countries, while actors located throughout the rest of the seafood value chain receive far less attention and pressure to improve.

4. Embrace the diversity of seafood
The ‘seafood’ in the sustainable seafood narrative encompasses around 2500 species (FAO, 2018; Hornborg et al., 2016) across all trophic levels from primary producrs to top carnivores, spanning sea-weed, finfishes, mollusks, crustaceans, cnidarians, echinoderms, am-phibians, and reptiles, that can all be harvested from the wild or farmed on land, including freshwater or in the sea. This multitude of species is typically represented in reports as crude sectoral categories (e.g. fish, farmed fish, trawl fisheries) or as a single animal-source food (fish) next to beef, pork, and/or chicken (Clark and Tilman, 2017; Poore and Nemecek, 2018; Tilman and Clark, 2014). The reality is that assessing the environmental impact and/or nutritional benefits of seafood re-quires a more detailed consideration of different combinations of species, production, and processing techniques he bulk of research and advice by sustainable seafood programs is focused on those few species groups traded on international markets largely destined for consumption in high income countries (Ward and Phillips, 2008). Likewise, consumption patterns within high income countries do not follow global production patterns (Jonell et al., 2019). In the U.S., ten species account for 84% of all seafood consumed (National Marine Fisheries Service, 2018). Within aquaculture, shrimp, pangasius, tilapia, and salmon, are the groups that are particularly popular in high income countries (Belton and Bush, 2014) yet represent only ∼24% of global aquaculture production by mass (FAO, 2018).

5. Conclusion-reframing the sustainable seafood narrative for greater inclusion into the global agenda on ecosystem and human health

By highlighting the interdependence between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and placing seafood in the wider food system we can better understand and act in response to the varied role that fisheries and aquaculture production plays in the equitable delivery of high quality low-impact food for human consumption. This is a specific case of a broader call to equally address impacts of all food production to de-termine linkages underlying a better understanding of the true cumu-lative impact of our current food system (Halpern et al., 2019). Ap-plying a food systems approach to seafood could enable the development of more effective state regulations and private-voluntary tools to promote more sustainable production along the entire supply chain (Bailey et al., 2018). This would help NGOs, industry, govern-ment and academia alike to move beyond the simple equating ‘sus-tainable seafood’ with ‘ocean health’ and allow for integration of sea-food into wider policy debates centering on planetary health, food equity, and human nutrition.

Overall, we identify three direct benefits of taking a ‘seafood sys-tems approach’, building on our arguments above.

First, conventional narrow narratives that prioritize ocean health need to be replaced with broader, more comprehensive visions of sus-tainable seafood production. NGOs and businesses communicating im-provements in sourcing need to address outcomes honestly. Importantly, a systemic approach will move research and policy alike beyond proximate impacts of seafood production. Instead it can enable us to understand the contributions that a full seafood system makes, alongside those from agriculture, to a set of common challenges in-cluding climate change, eutrophication, etc. along with linkages of seafood production to the wider context of each other (i.e. fisheries and aquaculture) and inter-connected terrestrial systems. From this per-spective species/production/supply system combinations of seafood should move to appropriate metrics that facilitate comparison not only with one another, but also with terrestrial animal and crop production.

Second, there is a need to broaden the focus to advance beyond the productionist agenda that identifies producers, primarily in low income countries, as being mainly responsible for seafood sustainability. Instead, research and policy should expand sustainability problems and solutions away from a fixation on production and producers, to include trade and traders, processing and processors, and consumption and consumers. In that sense, a food systems perspective would highlight better the interlinkages between these practices and actors, showing that positive social economic and environmental changes can be made along the value chains that can affect sustainability.

Third, seafood should not be treated as a single broad aggregated category in sustainability assessments, but rather should be recognized as being differentiated based on varying production systems, edible yields and nutritional profiles. Communication of the benefits and im-pacts of seafood must adopt a nuanced approach that better accounts for the potential environmental and social consequences of this im-portant food, and the ways in which environmental externalities can be reduced through the consumption of lower impact foods. Discussing fisheries and aquaculture products as part of a food system will increase our ability to develop lower impact future food solutions and create a more food and nutrition secure future (Hicks et al., 2019).

This paper is not the first to call for consideration of seafood within a food systems context (Béné et al., 2015; Olson et al., 2014). However, the continued lack of food system approaches to seafood sustainability continues to raise concern among the seafood research community. Many of these production systems and supply chains have laudable attributes that can be leveraged to help improve the environmental and social impact performance of food systems globally. By developing a seafood systems approach, fisheries and aquaculture can be main-streamed into the global agenda on ecosystem and human health. While such inclusion is not a panacea for all impacts that arise from producing food, it will contribute toward a more food-secure future.