Fish or Foul: Selling Seafood Sustainably

By CSRwire Contributing Writer Francesca Rheannon of Sea Change Media

As scientists find we can save the world's fisheries, some supermarket chains are making big strides in promoting sustainable fishing, while others are dragging their heels.

"Catch of the Day" may disappear as an item on our menus, at least as far as some popular ocean-based seafood species are concerned. Whether through outright overfishing or practices like bottom trawling that destroy marine environments, if current trends persist, most commercial stocks of saltwater fish will be gone by 2048. At least that's what ocean scientist Boris Worm said back in 2006 in a widely-covered study.

But now he and several other scientists have come out with a report, published in the journal Science in late July that shows some rays of hope piercing the briny gloom. In five out of the ten marine ecosystems studied, including some in the U.S., the rate that fish are being caught have dropped to the point that should allow local fish stocks to recover. Three other areas are still being overfished, but efforts to correct that have begun. (The news isn't allgood: the study found that 68 percent of the worldwide fisheries examined by the team are still in big trouble.)

Those efforts should be helped by the adoption of policies to promote sustainable fishing by some major supermarket chains. The northeast chain Giant Food just announced a partnership with the New England Aquarium to boost access to sustainable seafood from sources following sound environmental and social practices, like farming fish without pesticides and antibiotics. (Giant gets bonus points in my book for including "social consciousness" in its idea of sustainable seafood practices - a link many companies have yet to make.)

Through its parent company Ahold, Giant garnered the number two spot on Greenpeace's recently released seafood sustainability scorecard of grocery chains, besting even Whole Foods. (The latter came in third, despite strong efforts to supply only sustainably raised fish to customers.) In this third annual report on the issue from Greenpeace, more than half of the leading twenty supermarket chains showed progress over previous years. By contrast, the first year of the report, every single one of them failed. "It was a little depressing," Greenpeace's senior oceans specialist John Hocevar told this reporter. But he was pleased with this year's progress, which he said has occurred mostly in the larger chains.

Not so, however, for Trader Joe's, a smaller chain that is expanding aggressively nationwide. It came in near rock bottom at number seventeen on Greenpeace's scorecard. The chain, which touts its "green" sensibility, has been the subject of a fierce consumer campaign by Greenpeace to pressure the company to adopt a more responsible position.

The campaign makes the company the butt of savage humor to get its points across: that "Traitor Joe" sells threatened species like orange roughy. The species reproduces very slowly -- individual fish can live up to a hundred years -- and so is very vulnerable to overfishing, says Hocevar. Adding to the threat is the way trawlers take the fish out of the ocean: by dragging nets along the sea mountains where the fish like to live, destroying fragile corals that supply habitat to many other ocean species, as well. (While writing this, I found out that Greenpeace is now dropping boulders into the waters off Sweden to protect fish from bottom trawlers.)

Trader Joe's now says it plans to "use the Monterey Bay Aquarium's 'Seafood Watch' recommendations to help with [its] seafood purchasing decisions", but it admits to offering species on the Watch's "avoid" list.

The grocery chain could use a new online tool for sourcing its seafood: Fishchoice. Using sustainability criteria developed by several major environmental organizations (including The New England Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium), it connects commercial seafood buyers like restaurants and retailers to a database of sustainable seafood producers.

Companies like Trader Joes and Price Chopper (19th on Greenpeace's seafood sustainability scorecard) have no excuses left. There are many resources they can use to give the public what it increasingly wants: fish that will be on the tables of their descendants - instead of in fables of what we should have done to protect the oceans, but didn't.