Even countries with top fisheries management are likely consuming seafood with lower sustainability standards and contributing to unsustainable fishing practices of countries with lower management
Freshwater and marine products sourced from wild capture and aquaculture fisheries, referred to from here onward as seafood, play a critical role in global food systems. In 2017, approximately 3.3 billion people derived 20 percent of their animal protein intake from fish, with this percentage being even higher for many developing and small island nations. In addition to providing sustenance, seafood and fishing industries are an important source of jobs and income for many people around the world, supporting the livelihoods of more than 10 percent of the global population. As demand for fisheries as a source of food and livelihoods increases, so do potential negative environmental impacts stemming from unsustainable fishing (e.g. loss of biodiversity, fisheries-induced evolution through artificial selection for biological traits due to fishing practices and altered trophic dynamics).
Sustainable fisheries can be defined in many ways. The effectiveness of these indicators (and thus fisheries management) is dependent on the quality of data available, the usage of appropriate modeling methods, and ultimately, the successful application of regulatory efforts. As such, one measure of fisheries sustainability on the scale of countries is the relative level of fisheries management and enforcement. Increased fisheries management intensity is associated with more sustainable fisheries production. That is, countries that are better equipped to establish strong fisheries management, particularly in reference to enforcement, fishing regulations, and capacity to conduct stock assessments, have relatively few overfished stocks.
Similarly, within aquaculture, countries that have the stability and capacity to support strong property rights and establish regulatory oversight of the industry have more strongly managed and sustainable aquaculture production. While countries with stronger capacity to manage their fisheries generally produce sustainable seafood, the sustainability of their consumption is the product of both locally produced seafood and imports from other countries—the latter operating outside the bounds of national fisheries management.
Trade in seafood products is increasingly globalized. As some of the most traded food commodities in the world, 78 percent of seafood products experience competition from international trade and 38 percent of all fisheries production enters international trade markets. The globalization of seafood markets means that countries are not just consuming seafood products that they produce themselves but rather are a part of a vast network of international seafood trade that derives products from many different sources. This creates potential for a mismatch between seafood production and seafood consumption sustainability.
This article, summarized from the original publication, explored the nature of seafood sustainability based on the well-established relationship between strong fisheries management and increased fisheries production, using a metric of fisheries management intensity, the Fisheries Management Index (FMI), as a proxy for seafood production sustainability.
Study setup
Three sources of data were used in this study: the FAO Food Balance Sheet of fish and fishery products, the Global Trade Atlas (GTA) dataset, and the FMI. Information from these sources and various assumptions regarding the nature of trade of seafood products and consumption were used to estimate the management intensity of seafood products that are consumed within a country. Using these values we explored seafood sustainability, using the management of seafood products as a proxy to compare sustainability of seafood consumed and produced across countries globally.
For detailed information on the sources of data and analyses, refer to the original publication.
Results and discussion
Countries associated with more sustainable seafood production, on average, consume seafood products at lower sustainability levels than what they produce (Fig. 1). Countries that are known for producing well-managed, sustainable seafood are leaning heavily on countries with less sustainable management practices to supply the seafood they consume.
Those countries at the upper end of seafood production sustainability, which are known for maintaining well-managed fisheries stocks, will inevitably see decreases in the sustainability of their seafood consumption the more they rely on imports from other countries. We found that the percent change between production and consumption sustainability for the most sustainable producers was surprisingly large; for instance, the highest disparities by country included the USA (22.95 percent decrease from production to consumption sustainability), Canada (13.89 percent), and the United Kingdom (10.28 percent). For the aquaculture exclusion analysis, we found the highest disparities among the USA (23.43 percent), New Zealand (14.48 percent), Canada (12.02 percent), and the United Kingdom (10.54 percent). There also was a shift in the top 25 seafood producers, with Argentina and India no longer making the top 25 and New Zealand and South Africa being added.
The points depict the raw data (countries), while the lines show the linear model results. The shaded areas around the lines denote the 95 percent confidence intervals for the linear model fit. The different colors denote the different consumption sustainability (FMIC) derivations. The black line shows the hypothetical direct 1:1 relationship between the two variables for comparison.
Our findings not only highlight the overall disparity in management intensity globally, but also the tendency for countries to trade across this management intensity gradient. Many countries, especially in the developed world, are net importers of seafood, meaning they consume more than they produce. It follows that the sustainability of their seafood consumption will shift principally based on the countries from which they import.
In general, developed countries import most of their seafood products from developing countries. Decreased fisheries production in developed countries, potentially because of declines in stock status and more stringent management in recent years, has led to an increased reliance on seafood imports among these countries. An increase in the production and export of seafood from the developing world has largely met this demand. Fisheries management and governance in the developing world is generally less extensive than in the developed world, and as such this flow of exports from developing to developed countries contributes to a discrepancy in the overall sustainability of seafood consumption in developed countries compared to their production. This relationship is reflected in our analysis results.
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Furthermore, developing countries tend to import less seafood and rely more heavily on their own production to supply their seafood consumption. As such, in both developed and developing countries, seafood consumption is heavily reliant on products that are subject to less stringent sustainability standards. We can see this relationship clearly in our examination of the USA, the largest importer of seafood globally across the time period we studied. The USA is estimated to rely on imports for 62–65 percent of its seafood consumption. Every trade partner in the top 25 sources of imports to the USA from 2012–2017 had lower fisheries production sustainability than the USA, which is largely to be expected given that the USA is one of the top producers of sustainable seafood. Any country on the upper end of the production sustainability spectrum will see a decrease in their consumption sustainability if they engage in seafood trade; however, most USA imports originated from countries from the lower half of the production sustainability spectrum.
From the perspective of the largest exporters of seafood, it is apparent that the observed disparities in sustainability are exacerbated by the dominance of China in the seafood export market. In both of our analyses, China accounted for over 20 percent of global exports of seafood. This is due to their own substantial seafood production but is also closely linked to their dominant role in global seafood processing. Not only is China responsible for the largest proportion of exports, but those seafood products are distributed with remarkably broad global reach. As a result, the sustainability of seafood produced in China is a part of the seafood consumption sustainability budget of most countries across the globe.
Many seafood products traverse complex global processing and supply chains before they reach their final destination. When products are imported, processed, and exported as new products they get attributed to the country that did the processing, not the country that initially harvested them. There are some cases where it is likely that the challenges associated with accounting for re-exports resulted in our under- or over-estimating the proportion of seafood consumption associated with domestic versus imported fisheries products.
This issue of re-exports is just one in a list of challenges facing seafood traceability. Fisheries reporting largely fails to capture transshipment, or offloading of catch to refrigerated vessels at sea, masking original catch locations. There are also issues with illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing practices, mislabeling, high seas fishing, and private fisheries agreements that result in products being attributed to countries separate from where they are harvested. Furthermore, there is no direct reporting of whether products are derived from capture fisheries or aquaculture. While we tried in this study, without a reliable means to track products from their source to their consumption, it is challenging to accurately estimate the sustainability of seafood consumption. Beyond academic pursuits, this lapse in the accounting of seafood traceability makes efforts to promote sustainability at the consumer level extremely difficult.
A potential spillover effect of the inability to determine the origin of seafood is a shielding of less sustainable products from economic disincentives to production, and thus an indirect promotion of unsustainable fisheries. That is, while consumers have the power to promote improved fisheries management practices through their seafood purchases, doing so requires accurate information on seafood sourcing.
The inability of consumers to determine the sustainability of their seafood creates a market failure in which consumers who are willing to pay for sustainability are unable to reliably purchase sustainable products. Clearer information about sustainable products could end this market failure and increase sustainable production. Unfortunately, the failure of the global trade system to provide consumers with a means to determine the sustainability of product choices takes away the incentive for producers to invest in increasing sustainability. In the incredibly competitive global seafood industry, this market failure makes an aggressive commitment to sustainable production economically perilous, especially for wholesalers that cannot establish brand identity with customers. To increase the sustainability of seafood on a global scale, we argue that we must first address the biggest hurdle present in this study, the opacity of trade reporting.
Perspectives
How can global seafood traceability be improved in the face of growing trade complexity? At the level of trade reporting, Chan et al. have suggested extending the international standardized system of names and codes for trade classification (HS) to include 10 digits that would allow for more specificity in product reporting. While increased specificity in customs product reporting would certainly help decrease the uncertainty in tracing supply chains, there is still a need for a mechanism to track seafood from the point of capture to the point of consumption.
Emerging technologies such as blockchain provide one avenue for addressing this need. Blockchain in the context of fisheries would provide a definitive, immutable digital record of the path of a seafood product from the point of capture to the point of consumption. This type of technology is not without barriers to implementation including regulatory uncertainty, limited interoperability, and lack of centralized management. Nevertheless, if blockchain technology continues to improve and become less expensive, it could measurably improve seafood traceability and consumption accounting.
Developed countries that have the capacity to do so have largely implemented intensive fisheries management that supports sustainable seafood production; however, a country’s seafood consumption is the result of a complex network of global production and trade. We demonstrated that even the countries with the best fisheries management are likely consuming seafood held to much lower sustainability standards. It follows that these high production sustainability countries are contributing via their seafood consumption to the economic drivers behind the unsustainable fishing practices of countries with less intensive management. Thus, any assessment of national seafood sustainability that does not account for the role of trade in seafood consumption will continue to paint a skewed picture of sustainability that is particularly rosy for the wealthiest countries.
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Author
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Kayla M. Blincow, Ph.D.
College of Science and Mathematics, University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, United States of America, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America
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