A NEW WAY TO PROTECT BIODIVERSITY? THE CASE OF
SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD CONSUMER CAMPAIGNS
[SLIDE] Today, I will talk about sustainable seafood and the role of consumer campaigns in the
United States. Since 1998, sustainable seafood has been framed as an important consumption
issue. Seafood is being seen as biodiversity in need of protection whereas it was viewed as simply
a resource to be hunted. Now, consumers and chefs are being cast in a new role – that of putting
pressure on industry to change its methods through the marketplace.
[SLIDE] This is what I will talk about today.
1. The nature of marine biodiversity.
2. The impacts of industrial fishing on fish populations.
3. The emergence of private groups in biodiversity policy, especially with regard to marketbased instruments.
4. The problem of “distance” between seafood producers and consumers.
5. The development of seafood consumer campaigns.
6. Some issues for environmental politics that such campaigns raise.
As you can see, I’m trying to point out some different dimensions. I’ll be mixing together
ecology, seafood industry structure, markets, and policy. The mixture of factors reflects a new era
of biodiversity politics. It’s not just the politics of getting science to influence fishery policies, but
the politics of trying to harness the market in support of biodiversity. I want, in particular, to look
at how private groups can play an important role in framing biodiversity as a resource, not as
something to be conserved. These groups, moreover, can pioneer new ways of using the market
alongside traditional regulatory approaches. This is not necessarily a positive development. We’ll
discuss this at the end.
Half-way through the lecture, we’ll break into small groups for 20 minutes and discuss what
information you may need to buy “sustainable” seafood at the market. After that, we’ll sum up
the groups by writing on the blackboard. Then I’ll continue with my lecture. As we go through
the lecture, please write down your questions and pass them to Barbara or Mark.
[SLIDE] First, let’s look at marine biodiversity. Compared to terrestrial biodiversity, this area has
received far less scientific and policy attention. There was a recent letter to Nature journal
pointing out that there is a great disparity between marine and terrestrial biodiversity when it
comes to published research and data. Only 5% of ecology reports deal with marine biodiversity.
Even marine ecology journals don’t deal much with conservation issues. Much less information is
therefore available as to the numbers of marine species and their rates of extinction.
The World Conservation Union estimates that there are at least 1 million species livng on coral
reefs and maybe over 10 million in the oceans. No-one really knows because it is extremely
difficult to count fish swimming in the sea. Today’s important statistic is that at least 25,000
species of fish are thought to exist, many of these freshwater. The WCU says that it is building a
database of all species to serve as a baseline, but mentions that marine species will be covered
after 2008, revealing the paucity of information.
On the other hand, we do know that marine ecosystems have higher genetic diversity because
almost all the major types of plants and animals are found in the sea. The sea has many diverse
habitats, ranging from kelp forests, coral reefs, mangrove flats, seagrass bays, continental shelves,
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to the deep seas. The numbers of species may not be so important as how the species form part of
marine ecosystems.
The Biodiversity Convention Secretariat publishes the Global Biodiversity Outlook every few
years to provide a snapshot of trends. Strikingly, the latest edition has almost no quantitative data
on marine biodiversity. In contrast to terrestrial biodiversity, there are no estimates of percentage
rates of extinction, or of total marine species. Instead, there are a few examples of endangered
fish, bird, and mammal species. There is also a map showing the total fish harvests for 1995 for
each region of the world. This underscores a pattern that we see across the field. Marine
biodiversity is almost equated to fishing, because there are some statistics available.
The report does say: “As a gross generalization, marine species appear to be less prone to
extinction than inland water or terrestrial ones”. This is because the oceans supposedly provide a
buffer zone: humans don’t live in them. Also, marine species tend to be distributed more widely,
making them less vulnerable. But this isn’t reassuring. Over 95% of the oceans are unexplored.
The deeper parts of the sea are largely unknown. Equally important, pollution knows no
boundaries. Thus, we might be losing species without knowing it. Literally, the sea is far from
sight, therefore out of mind. These gaps in knowledge are also found for terrestrial biodiversity.
But they seem much graver in the sea.
[SLIDE] We need to keep the broader context in mind. There are many environmental and human
pressures on marine biodiversity. Over-fishing is only one causal agent. Other important factors
include agricultural pollution run-off, chemicals accumulating in marine mammals, global
environmental change, coastal development damaging habitats, and the spread of exotic species.
About 60% of the world’s population lives along coastal areas. So their energy use, buildings,
pollution, industry, and garbage are going to affect the sea. The shipping industry generates a vast
amount of pollution. Recent research has found that climate has played a major forcing role over
the last few thousands years. Marine species distribution varies with climate. Climate change due
to human emissions will likely be important in the next few decades. So, addressing over-fishing
is only one part of marine biodiversity problems.
Let’s turn now to the impacts of fishing on marine species. There are a growing number of
scientific papers showing that marine fisheries may be plummeting around the world. The paper
by Myers and Worm from Nature journal is a good example. They analyzed decades of fish
biomass data from continental shelf and open ocean systems, starting when these areas first began
to be fished heavily. [SLIDE] This is one chart from the paper. It shows the fish biomass of the
Temperate Pacific, which is where we are. As you can see, there is a huge drop in catch per 100
hooks from over 10 to around 1.5. Myers and Worm concluded that world fisheries are now at
only 10% of their original levels. More importantly, they concluded that industrial fishing reduces
biomass by 80% within just 15 years. This means that using more recent data to assess fishery
sustainability may be flawed because the original populations were much bigger. The study
implies that industrial fishing has moved from ocean to ocean progressively. Industry gobbles fish
up everywhere. Other papers are pointing to similar trends.
The Food and Agricultural Organization has the only global data set available. It depends on
national governments reporting their fish landing statistics. According to this data set, harvests of
fish in the wild have grown steadily over time. Compared to 1950, there is a vastly higher
production level, rising from 30 million tonnes to around 130 million tonnes. [SLIDE] This chart,
created by Canadian scientists, differs from the official FAO graph because it includes discards
(that is, fish thrown away) and illegal, unreported, or unregulated catches. FAO has been ignoring
these additional catches, therefore providing a misleading picture of just how stressed fisheries
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are. The official harvest levels at sea have hovered around 86 million tons each year in the 1990s,
suggesting that fishing has reached a plateau. Even so, marine fisheries have grown five-fold
since 1950.
As of 1995, FAO says that only 25 percent of fisheries were not being fully exploited. In contrast,
fisheries were 47-50% fully exploited, 18 percent overexploited, and 9-10% depleted. You can
see this in the elegant chart. The other chart shows how fisheries have progressively become
stagnant or declining in their total production output. Only 40% of fisheries are still providing
growth. Put another way, 15 of the world’s 17 largest fisheries are badly over-fished.
So that’s the situation that we face when we think about marine biodiversity. What do private
groups such as environmentalists, marine aquariums, foundations, companies, and marketing
boards have to do with conserving this biodiversity?
Many fisheries have been regulated at the national and international levels in some way or other
for decades. The US, for example, has a patchwork of regional fishing councils that are supposed
to oversee fishery management. In some cases, fishermen can only work for part of the year.
Fishermen may not be allowed to keep fish from a specific species, such as with the New England
cod fishery which has had a moratorium imposed on it. Or fishermen can only keep fish that
exceed size and age thresholds. In Australia, transferable fishing rights have been tried out,
notably for tuna. Fisherman are given catch quotas that mean they don’t need to rush out and
harvest as many fish as they can. They can sell the quotas to other fishermen and make money.
Indeed, fishing is one of the most nationally and internationally regulated activities. This is even
if the regulations aren’t always adequate. International and regional agreements, like the
Convention for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna, have become increasingly important.
This range of governance compares with most biodiversity conservation efforts, which are fairly
recent.
The important point is that it’s governments who take the responsibility for biodiversity
protection. This is how biodiversity has been traditionally protected. The Biodiversity Convention
envisages governments as the central actors in conservation through setting up protected areas
like national parks, making and enforcing laws for land use, and controlling the settlement of
people near biologically rich areas. Governments are at the center of action. In the US, it has been
the National Marine Fisheries Service that has overseen fishery policy and done much of the
research. Environmental and industry groups, like Environmental Defense and the National
Fisheries Institute, have tried to shape ocean policy for decades. But they have been focusing on
lobbying governments to change their regulations or policies.
In this course, you’ll have noted that significant changes have been happening in international
biodiversity policy. Worldwide, since the 1990s, private groups have been playing a greater role
in conserving biodiversity. They are emerging alongside governments as new actors. This is
happening at a time when there is growing skepticism of the capacity of governments to decide
and act. The range of actors active in biodiversity efforts has broadened considerably.
[SLIDE] Over the 1990s, the private sector became more important in conserving biodiversity in
both developed and developing countries. NGOs worked with bankers to achieve debt-for-nature
swaps to ease developing country debt in return for new reserves. Companies opened private
parks and began promoting ecological tourism to see wildlife in their habitats. Investors set up
ethical financial businesses. Government institutes made agreements with companies to study
biological and genetic material to use in making perfumes or medicines. Scientists acting as
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entrepreneurs tried to get private funds in return for access to the ecosystem services that national
parks can provide. Local communities founded their own ventures to profit from tourists and
research investments. These experiments have focused on terrestrial biodiversity. But they can be
applied to marine biodiversity too.
Because of these experiments, the Conference of Parties to the Biodiversity Convention has
declared in its new strategic plan of 2002 that market-based approaches are essential. Private
groups can increase the availability of resources for conservation far beyond what governments
and the Global Environmental Fund can. At least, that’s what policy-makers now hope. Private
funds can fill in for all the resource problems that have undermined biodiversity efforts, like a
lack of national park policing to stop poachers.
However, the list of activities leaves out one important area. Before the late 1990s, there wasn’t
much attention to how private actors could use information strategies to shift business behavior
when it came to biodiversity. That is, how information can change the ways in which consumers
decide to buy goods that affect biodiversity, or how information can change the public reputation
of companies such as Chevron, the San Francisco-based oil company, for their impacts on
biodiversity.
In other areas, such as industrial agriculture, there have been growing efforts by concerned
farmers and environmentalists since the 1970s to provide information direct to consumers about
what they are eating. Organic foods, for example, have labels explaining that they are pesticidefree, and are supplied in combination with marketing campaigns highlighting who produced these
foods. In the fields of consumer product and pharmaceutical safety, warning labels are pervasive.
They tell people that clothes may be flammable, or that drugs should not be taken in specific
mixtures. One of the biggest reasons why not much progress has been made in conserving
biodiversity may be that people don’t have the information they need to gauge their effects on
biodiversity.
Let’s stop and take a break. I’d like you to form small groups and discuss for 15 minutes what
information you think you would need to be able to buy seafood that is sustainable at the
supermarket.
BREAK
Today, I want to focus on what private groups – at least in the United States – are trying to do
about sustainable seafood from a strategic point of view. How and why are these private actors
stepping in to protect biodiversity through the market? Is this changing the way that we think
about biodiversity? Note, I am talking only about the US as a case. There’s a lot of activity going
on in Europe as well.
[SLIDE] Let’s look at why industrial fishing has caused all the problems. Since the 1970s, the
seafood industry has changed greatly in its equipment, methods, scale, and organization. These
changes have accelerated the harvest of seafood in the wild. Catching fish by hook and reel is
now seen as inefficient. This slide shows the main fishing methods. Enormous nets and lines are
used to capture fish. In long-lining, a boat releases a line that can be up to 50 miles long and that
has thousands of baited hooks. In trawling, nets are dragged behind boats, scooping up fish
indiscriminately. Since the 1980s, rock-hopper nets are widely used to trawl on the seabed for
fish, with rubber rollers being attached to the nets to allow them to pass over the seabed without
getting entangled. The effect is to strip away all marine life.
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Fishermen can now fish in deeper water and in complex habitats. They can also use advanced
technology like sonar, global position systems, and heat detectors to track fish. As a result, overharvesting and habitat destruction have escalated. There are 3.5 million fishing boats, but only 1
percent are industrial boats. According to the World Conservation Union, these boats take at least
60% of the total catch, highlighting their immense impact. Most boats are owned by local
fishermen who have to compete with the industry boats.
Onshore, fish processing has expanded greatly. Processors make standard products like frozen
fillets, fish fingers, packaged fish, and cans. Fish fingers are now “made of white fish” which
covers species ranging from cod to pollock. It is much easier for processors to substitute fish
freely. Multi-national companies – such as Unilever and Nestle – are increasingly dominant.
Simultaneously, the seafood industry depends on worldwide transportation. Consumers demand
fresh fish, so catches need to be transported quickly and over vast distances. The advent of the
Boeing 747 helped, as did refrigeration technology that allowed boats to freeze and store fish.
What’s an important observation that we can make here? It is that production decisions are
separated from consumption decisions by different layers of distance. That is, consumers are
geographically separated from the oceans where production happens, and culturally separated
from the producers by a complex production chain. Fish is usually caught far out at sea, not on
the rivers and lakes where many people fish for recreation. Fish is also rarely caught locally; in
most places in the US, fish has to come from many different places at once. Tens of actors may
help move fish from the sea to the plate: fishermen, fish buyers, processors, transporters,
distributors, and retailers. Often, there will be at least five or seven steps of distribution within the
US alone. In the globalized business, seafood is mixed together quickly so that it becomes
untraceable. This diagram illustrates the demersal fish commodity chain in Britain. How are
consumers going to find their way through this morass?
The immense distances between producers and consumers has led to a mangling of information
flows throughout the production chain. Consumers usually make decisions on what to buy
without knowing where their seafood has come from, how it was harvested, what the status of the
species is, or who caught the fish. Indeed, surveys have found that American consumers have low
levels of knowledge about fish status. For example, over 70% of consumers are unsure about
whether cod stocks are even in jeopardy. Consumers cannot easily observe the environmental and
social impacts of production. Most fishing activity happens at sea and the effects of fishing, such
as smaller, younger fish or seabed destruction, aren’t visible. Thus, consumers have few ways of
verifying that ecological problems are not being caused. There is no feedback between consumers
and producers that could shape their collective decision-making. In the end, responsibility for
ecological damage is diffused across the entire production sequence, without anyone being liable
for their acts.
These are issues that you don’t usually come across when thinking about biodiversity. You think
of biodiversity as something that is shaped by habitat destruction, like cutting forests down, or by
over-hunting species. But if you factor the consumption angle in, these issues become much more
important. It is the collective acts of consumers that can help damage biodiversity by their
demand for biological products such as seafood. To target these consumption decisions, we may
need to track and make transparent the production history of seafood.
[SLIDE] In the last four years, many US environmental groups have established a sustainable
seafood campaign aimed at influencing consumers to change their behavior. They also work on
production system issues, but the consumer campaigns are now the most visible. The Monterey
Bay Aquarium, one of the world’s foremost marine science centers, has led the way. Starting in
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1998, the Aquarium has run a high profile campaign, “Seafood Choices”. Other groups, including
Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wildlife Conservation
Society, and the Audubon Society have joined the bandwagon, advocating their own approaches.
But why didn’t environmental NGOs get in on the act earlier than the late 1990s? Why did they
leave the market out for so long? There are several reasons.
First, there is a long history of viewing fish as wildlife. Fishing is practically the last mass
hunting activity. In the 1970s, Greenpeace first became well-known for its anti-whaling
campaigns. This era saw small Greenpeace boats trying to disrupt whaling. More recently, in the
early 1990s, there were campaigns to reduce dolphin by-catch killed when catching tuna.
Dolphins are considered wildlife as much as elephants and tigers are. This view started to change
as a result of successful seafood campaigns. Two were especially important: the Natural
Resources Defense Council’s swordfish boycott (around 1994 to 1996) and the National
Environmental Trust’s “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass” boycott (from 1997 to 1999). These
showed environmental groups that campaigns focused on individual seafood species, and at
consumer buying in restaurants and fish markets, could work better than wildlife-based
campaigns.
Second, foundations and key environmental activists grew weary of trying to target fishery
management. They started to invest in consumer campaigns instead, thinking that these are more
quickly developed and put into practice. This also reflected 20 years of American politics, namely
the Reagan/Bush philosophy of relying on the market instead of on regulation. Other
environmental groups had successfully used individualistic, “personal actions” such as buying
nature calendars or planting trees to increase their membership and influence. Mike Sutton of the
Packard Foundation – based in the Bay Area – was instrumental in this shift. He argued that it
would be much more effective to work through market signals than regulation. He helped fund all
the environmental groups who set up a seafood consumer campaign.
Third, environmental groups realized that there was a widespread interest in whether seafood was
environmentally good. They had previously ignored consumers as a source of information,
assuming that they needed to look at fisheries. They now understood that there could be a mass
movement of citizens built on seafood consumption. The Monterey Bay Aquarium campaign
started quite serendipitously. In 1996, the Aquarium held a fishing exhibition, and started to think
about what it served in its Portola café for the first time. Visitors heard about the review of the
menu and began asking for advice on what they could buy. The Aquarium then identified a need
for information among consumers from the bottom up, whereas it had previously seen the issue as
mainly a problem of improving marine science.
[SLIDE] What happened as a result of these developments? In the mid-1990s, environmental
NGOs began to look at fish as the endpoint, rather than as a part of the fisheries that they had
been working to protect. They re-framed the problem as food consumption rather than as just
wildlife conservation.
Instead of there simply being too many fishermen pursuing too few fish, the cause of biodiversity
loss was re-framed as too many consumers choosing too vulnerable fish. The Monterey Bay
Aquarium explains: “Increased consumer demand for seafood is depleting fish stocks around the
world”. Another seafood activist group, the Audubon Society Living Oceans program, says:
“More people than ever before are choosing to eat seafood and to meet this growing demand,
more and more fish and shellfish are being caught and farmed than ever before”. These groups
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are casting seafood as something to be eaten. This shifts attention to how seafood is caught and
brought to the dinner table.
[SLIDE] The solution, as seen by the groups, is to change consumption patterns on a large scale.
Addressing the perennial question of how individuals can make a difference, the Audubon
Society argues: “By choosing your seafood wisely, you can help shift demand away from fish and
shellfish that are overfished or poorly managed towards those that are in better shape.” The
Aquarium adds: “Consumer purchasing power can support sustainable fisheries and fish farms
while relieving pressure on overfished populations.” The Natural Resources Defense Council
says: “And while action both by the U.S. and on a global level is needed to protect ocean fish and
their habitats, consumers hold one of the most powerful tools – the ability to make informed
choices in restaurants and markets.”
The Audubon Society asks whether individuals really can do something. In response, the group
argues that people can let supermarkets and chefs know that they want sustainable seafood.
“Remember that the seafood selections you see in the supermarket and on restaurant menus are
there because people are demanding them.” Underlying this argument is a theory of consumer
choice as democracy. Individuals can take responsibility for their consuming decisions. Their
personal identity is defined in terms of consumption. The argument goes: Consumers can turn
into citizens who vote with their buying decisions. “If enough people ask for a particular kind of
seafood, the demand will be great enough to make it profitable to sell it.” Consumers can change
the market through their collective actions.
The idea is that the market can be harnessed to steer consumption so that it helps conserve fish
species. If you are exploiting species, it’s better to do so sustainably. There is great scope to use
the market to influence how much fish is caught. I gave you a reading from the Seafood Choices
Alliance, “The Marketplace for Sustainable Seafood”. This is the first major attempt to quantify
the potential market for sustainable seafood in America. The report describes a lot of statistics
about the US seafood market. One important point is that the US imports 77 percent of its seafood
from overseas. This means an even greater distance between American consumers and producers.
What the report doesn’t do is put US consumption in context. For decades, the seafood industry
has been trying to stimulate greater consumption by Americans. By world standards, per capita
US consumption is relatively low at 16 pounds. Europeans typically eat 30 or more pounds;
Icelanders go ecstatic over 70 pounds (mostly cod) each year. Beef, chicken, and pork are much
more heavily consumed by Americans. So, there’s a lot of interest by the seafood industry in how
to expand the domestic US market.
In the last decade, the industry has been promoting seafood as a healthy eating option, using
scientific findings on substances like fatty oils found in fish. This, of course, doesn’t include toxic
substances like DDT or mercury which tend to accumulate in fish at the peak of the food web.
However, environmental groups and the Centers for Disease Control have emphasized these
problems. You can see the result in this table from the report. A survey found that 57 percent of
consumers see positive health results from eating fish. 41 percent are worried about eating
contaminated fish. There’s a surprisingly high rate of consumer concern about “harm done to
ocean environment by commercial fishing” – 33 percent.
Another important survey result is that 15 percent said that “whether species were overfished”
played a “great deal of importance” in their purchase decisions, along with 29% who said that this
was an important factor. If consumers can find out more about the environmental impacts of
seafood, then a new market may be created. However, the cost, freshness, and taste of fish are
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much more important to consumers. There’s evidence that consumers are most likely to choose
sustainable fish if their cost and quality criteria are met. That is, consumers use sustainability
criteria to “break the tie”. The problem is to get consumers to see “sustainability” as part of the
features that they should expect in seafood.
Where do the environmental NGOs fit in? They play a dual role here. They are trying to intervene
as new intermediary actors, not engaged in production and distribution, but filling in information
gaps between producer and consumer. Chefs are very busy people who don’t have the time to do
an exhaustive analysis of fishery science. They don’t have the time to bombard their suppliers
with questions about where their seafood comes from. Similarly, consumers don’t have the time
or cognitive capacity to do the work of making the production chain transparent. In the
campaigns, private groups are not putting money into fish species conservation, or trying to build
eco-tourism ventures. They are focusing on information supply as a way to break down the
distances between producers and consumers.
But how can consumers find out what to buy or eat? Here, this is where the environmental groups
have been quite pioneering. They have developed new methods to try to reach consumers in the
US to teach them about biodiversity. These methods are dominated by the wallet card concept.
Such cards are lists of seafoods typically grouped in categories of “good to eat”, “in doubt”, and
“to be avoided.” These are recommendations and rankings of species by the environmental
groups designed to guide consumer decision-making. The recommendations take account of how
sustainable the group thinks each chosen seafood is, based on biological, ecological, and fishery
management criteria that reflect “the best available science”.
Originally, environmental groups made this information available in the form of leaflets. They
found that this detail was not accessible to consumers. As a result, the wallet card was invented.
As the Audubon Society says: “The Fish Scale makes it easy to see at a glance how a particular
seafood is doing and helps guide consumer choices towards sources that are more abundant and
better managed.” Lists may be a good solution to the finite cognitive capacity of people to absorb
and use information in their everyday decisions.
The campaigns typically focus on a set of 30-50 individual species, categorized according to how
“sustainable” their harvest is believed to be at the time. Here are two examples.
[SLIDE] First, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a Seafood Choice card. This card separates over
45 species into a triptych:
- Best Choice (green -- fish caught or farmed in an “environmentally friendly way”),
- Caution (yellow -- there are problems with some of the sources so consumers need to check)
- Avoid (red -- do not eat until the population recovers or the fishing or fish farms cease to harm
the environment).
[SLIDE] Second, the Audubon Fish Scale rates 30 species on a descending scale from green to
yellow to red. The categories are:
- green (few problems exist; okay to eat)
- yellow (some problems exist, use your conscience)
- red (major problems exist; better to avoid)
Other schemes are similar.
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[SLIDE] Consumers are supposed to use this guidance in their decision-making. This is how the
Monterey Bay Aquarium urges consumers to act. They should ask at restaurants about where the
seafood comes from. For example: “Waiter, did my salmon come from Alaska, or a fish farm?”
They should interrogate supermarkets about where packaged and fresh fish originates. If the
counter person or the waiter doesn’t know, consumers should explain their sustainability
concerns. Environmental Defense suggests that consumers should familiarize themselves with the
issues. “The Just Ask campaign puts the power of information and choice into consumers’
hands”. Moreover, people should have contact with the seafood and cook it themselves. The
NGOs are publishing cookbooks, showing how much modern food practices have eroded the
ability of people to choose seafood. Chefs are also promoting recipes around the country.
There are plenty of environmental politics issues that the consumer campaigns bring up. I’ll just
mention a couple for now.
First, these campaigns are a new kind of strategy by environmental groups to protect biodiversity.
They are trying to take control over determining what species are “sustainable” and to train
consumers to buy fish according to their recommendations. In this way, they hope that consumer
pressure can somehow be funneled back through the production system to the fishing industry, to
force changes in fishing practices. As such, the groups are trying to become powerful players in
biodiversity alongside governments and the fishing industry.
But it’s noticeable that the groups largely do not refer to biodiversity as a reason why consumers
should refrain from eating specific species. They don’t mention the Convention on Biodiversity.
Protecting habitats is not emphasized much. Rather, the groups present consumer campaigns as
helping preserve enough favored fishes to eat over the next few decades. Environmental Defense
appeals to the self-interest of consumers: “Either we take the pressure off some marine species or
the catch of the day may not be around tomorrow.” The Audubon Society says seafood lovers
need to know that their love has to be expressed carefully, or it will not last beyond this
generation. Does this focus on fish as food instead of as biodioversity mean that the broader
biodiversity dimensions are lost? Are fish being valued as biological resources rather than as parts
of ecosystems?
The groups don’t deal with the actual impacts of recommending specific species over others.
Favoring some seafoods may mean that consumers will switch to these and intensify industry
pressures in much the same manner as fishermen have progressively moved between species as
populations have plummeted. Sustainable seafood may only exacerbate overfishing in the end.
Yet, the environmental groups argue that attending closely to the science of ecology, population
dynamics, and fishery management will avoid the risks of a debacle. Well-managed fisheries, it is
expected, will be able to absorb growing demand. But remember the Myer and Worm article?
Given the dramatic declines in fishing, isn’t it better not to eat or harvest many species at all?
Second, the campaigns can lead to the structural aspects of seafood production being ignored. It
isn’t just consumer behavior, but industry behavior, that shapes how fish are being seen as
sustainable. The industry helps make the market as well. Sustainability may not be disentangled
from marketing politics.
It may be that concentrating on individual species won’t lead to structural changes in the
fisheries.
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There are issues of sustainability that are being lost in the consumer campaigns. I couldn’t discuss
how the environmental groups use science to make their recommendations. But it seems to me
that they are taking a fairly limited view of sustainability. For example, a critical part of
sustainability is whether or not the fish is very high up on the food chain, like tuna or swordfish,
so that consuming the fish uses up greater biomass compared to eating tilapia or anchovies that
don’t eat other fish or that are small.
This is the old case of whether or not private groups are accountable for what they do. To cite
Kate’s forthcoming book chapter, the groups I’ve talked about today are “disciplining” all sorts of
actors: citizens, fishermen, consumers,
At the root of overfishing are powerful economic forces. Too many fish are being harvested; there
needs to be fewer fish killed. But this means that fishermen will have to lose their income.
How are these forces made less destructive?
Can sustainable harvest methods lead to better price premiums?
Finally, I would like to raise a few questions for you to discuss while I start answering your
questions.
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