The Tokyo Sustainable Seafood Summit (TSSS) recently held its 10th annual event, in which seafood industry representatives gathered to discuss ways to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and plastics in the ocean.
This year’s edition also covered topics new to the summit that are gaining more attention in the industry, such as the difficulties around getting blue financing initiatives off the ground and how best to prevent human rights abuses.
“Especially over the past two or three years, the finance sector has been taking the initiative in developing investment and loan programs that take into account environmental, social, and governance issues. There is a lot of improvement in the engagement of financial institutions for seafood companies,” said Wakao Hanaoka, the CEO and founder of Tokyo-based seafood sustainability consultancy firm Seafood Legacy, which organizes the summit.
Though Hanaoka highlighted the recent progress made in the space, François Mosnier, head of the oceans program at nonprofit Planet Tracker, said at the event that overfishing and IUU fishing are risk factors when lending to seafood-related companies.
That’s why a lot of current financing is going into land-based fish farming, according to summit speakers, as lenders have welcomed the fact that these operations do not contribute to ocean pollution.
Regarding the industry’s efforts to prevent human rights abuses, Valery Alzega, the deputy director of Washington, D.C., U.S.A.-based human rights organization Global Labor Justice, highlighted abusive conditions suffered by Indonesian migrant fishers on Taiwan-owned vessels in a session titled “Mitigating IUU risks from the seafood market in Japan and Asia: Establishment of interoperable full-chain traceability and improving transparency.”
One key demand of these fishers is securing access to Wi-Fi on vessels, which would allow crews to report abuse and contact their families while on the high seas.
“Without mandated regular Wi-Fi access to connect migrant fishers back to shore, the ocean is effectively a ‘no union zone’ for too many of these workers,” Alzaga said.
With the summit being a decade old, Hanaoka said he is thrilled at how far it has come since 2015.
Hanaoka said there were just five sessions and 10 speakers at the initial event in 2015, while there were 27 sessions and 72 speakers in 2024.
“I remember that there was only one speaker from a Japanese company at the first TSSS in 2015,” Hanaoka said. “I asked so many companies and individuals to talk about their initiatives or thoughts on the future of the seafood industry. However, most of them said that they were not comfortable talking about sustainability at that time. Now, half of the speakers at the TSSS are Japanese.”
