Nine advocates for sustainable seafood walked away with Seafood Champion Awards at the annual International Seafood Summit in Hong Kong Thursday. The awards were announced in the opening ceremony for the event, held at the Kowloon Shangri-La in Hong Kong.
This year’s winners represent leaders working on a variety of pressing seafood and ocean-related issues including illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, anti-shark finning, community-managed fisheries, traceability and fisheries improvement projects.
The winners are: Austral Fisheries? Osborne Park, Australia; Bahamas Marine Exporters Association ?of Nassau, Bahamas; Blue Ventures? Toliara, Madagascar; Francois Pasteau, chef/owner, L'Epi Dupin ?Paris; Jimmy Martinez Ortiz, Sub Secretariat of Fisheries?of Manabi Province, Ecuador; Taylor Shellfish Farms ?of Shelton, Wash., USA; Thomas Kraft, CEO of Norpac Fisheries Export in Seattle, USA; Victor Hamusa Kargbo, head of fisheries enforcement for the government of Sierra Leone ?Freetown, Sierra Leone; and Yao Ming, WildAid Ambassador? from Beijing, China.
“This year’s Seafood Champion Award winners represent a truly diverse and international group of leaders signaling the tremendous growth in the sustainable seafood movement over the past few years,” said Dawn Martin, president of SeaWeb. “Each one of these Champions has a unique and important story to tell of how they came to embracing sustainability as an essential component of their strategy and business plans.”
