Chris Ninnes is CEO of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and previously served as deputy CEO and director of operations at the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).
He has been chair of the ISEAL board since 2018 and chair of the Certification and Ratings Collaboration’s (CRC) Steering Committee since its inception in 2015. The Collaboration consists of the ASC, Fair Trade USA, MSC, Seafood Watch, and Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, working together to coordinate tools and increase impact so that more seafood producers move along a clear path toward environmental sustainability and social responsibility.
Ninnes’ op-ed was originally published on the ASC website.
The recent investigations uncovering human rights abuses in the farmed seafood industry, most recently in the shrimp industry in India, are very unsettling to read. While we all agree that these abuses should have no place in any industry, the reality is more stark and uncomfortable.
Human rights abuses can be found everywhere, and no system alone is perfect at eliminating all of them. The CRC’s data tool, which was originally developed to collate information about the environmental performance of seafood production from member assessments, now contains a global overview of key social metrics related to their occurrence. Shockingly, there is evidence of forced labor, child labor, or human trafficking within 65 percent of the countries assessed that are involved with 98 percent of seafood production. The frequency of these abuses differs by country, but such evidence is much harder to collect.
So, what can be done? How do companies and businesses assess the risk that they may be purchasing seafood that does not meet the standards we all expect? It starts with being honest about the risk and understanding how likely your exposure is.
The following simple questions will help assess this risk. Do you know exactly where your seafood was produced? Do you have visibility of all steps in the supply chain? Does your supply chain involve limited intermediaries? Are these intermediaries free from the use of migrant labor? If you answered "no" or "don’t know" to these questions, your business is at increased risk of having seafood tainted with human rights abuses.
Given that seafood is the most highly traded food commodity globally and that most markets, particularly those in Europe, North America, and Japan, are far from self-sufficient when it comes to domestic production, the uncomfortable reality is that most supply chains are at risk.
For instance, around 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported. In the European Union, the percentage is lower at around 70 percent. But, calculations are further complicated because national fleets owned directly or flagged out to third countries are also involved in domestic supply. Such supplies originating from international waters carry increased risk of human rights exposure. Additional guidance and resources for businesses can be found on CRC’s website.
Another unpalatable risk factor is the underlying poverty in the country of production or processing, along with poverty levels in the country of origin of migrant workers.
The rise of global supply chains has increased production and processing efficiency because labor costs are lower and regulatory frameworks are less restrictive. This is illustrated by the relative absence of farmed seafood production in Europe, the U.S., and Japan, driven by the regulatory burden of establishing seafood farms. However, with increasing competition for processing and seafood farming production between countries, the incentive to reduce labor costs also increases. This is often linked to the use of migrant labor – a cost-cutting exercise as domestic labor becomes less available.
The uncomfortable link between low labor costs and the presence of migrant labor with human rights abuses is well-documented across sectors. This has been starkly exposed within the seafood sector in the distant-water fishing fleets operating on the high seas, with shocking accounts of human rights abuses. Again, the uncomfortable link is that decreasing catches from poorly managed stocks and increasing operating costs (especially fuel) increase pressure to lower the cost of labor to the extent that modern slavery has been exposed.
While assessing these fundamental risks is a starting point, action across the supply chain from the end business buyer to the point of production is needed to reduce identified risks. Increasingly, legislation is driving businesses to “own” this risk. It is no longer sufficient to mitigate the risk through sourcing guidelines. Honestly owning the risk must include a recognition that guaranteeing supply chains are free from these risks is virtually impossible to do. Perhaps one of the most celebrated examples of such honesty is “Tony’s Chocolonely.”
“Our vision is 100 percent slave-free chocolate – not just our chocolate but all chocolate worldwide. The choice is yours. Are you in?” the company says in its advertising.
The chocolate sector is much smaller than seafood, but the example illustrates how you can publicly own the risk in a positive way: setting out the challenge but inviting others, such as the consumer, to share the burden of the solution.
Such “risk” ownership within the seafood sector would be a tipping point of recognition currently absent. Through a collective ambition to improve the current situation, this would create a positive commitment for change. It’s the only way that a sector-wide transformation can occur.
However, a commonly voiced criticism to such change is not the need for change itself but that it would be unevenly distributed or would be further driven into even harder-to-reach supply chains. But, owning the problem with an invitation to improve performance for a widely traded international commodity would have widespread and positive implications.
Admittedly, the footprint would not cover all supply chains, but many more would be indirectly influenced. This footprint would expand if businesses embraced a “seek-and-address” approach, where possible, rather than “cut-and-run,” providing, of course, that pathways to enable change are available. Investigating and identifying a problem only to avoid becoming involved in the solution is counterproductive to driving change.
Another critique is that market demand for improvement is not sufficient, and it is important to reflect over what timeline changes can and should occur. Certainly, the environmental and social challenge in front of us has been decadal in its making. The most important correlation has been increasing population growth. Equally, solutions will and must take time if they are to be long-lasting, which brings me to the role that certification can play.
The Role of Certification
The most important consideration is that while certification tools can be part of the solution, they are not a panacea for all of the world’s social and environmental woes. When certification schemes were originally conceived as a tool for market influence more than 30 years ago, they were often promoted as the ultimate solution. Experience has shown this to have too narrow an expectation.
Many of the criticisms that were leveled at seafood certification, as the MSC went through its painful early years, were that it was a niche approach, with no appeal to markets beyond Germany and the U.K. and of no interest to fisheries beyond the magnificent Thames herring. Some fishing nations maintained a negative national position, openly supporting and encouraging a boycott. Others sought to influence the market through national endorsement programs.
While some of these sentiments still exist and are clearly still emotive, certified seafood products go to over 100 markets, and an ever-increasing footprint of certified supplies belittles some of that early criticism. The ASC has followed a similar journey, perhaps with less emotion than MSC’s, but challenges remain for all certification programs in how they increase the footprint of their certified operations.
Certification is a valuable tool that provides assurances about a product’s integrity and authenticity. At their foundation, all certification programs have a standard, but content, coverage, and compliance levels differ. Not all certification programs have equal focus on social and environmental impacts. Credible standard systems also have layers of rules that detail how the standard is applied to ensure consistency of application, the skills required to deliver these rules, and the checks and balances deployed to ensure this is achieved.
This overarching framework is described well by ISEAL within its various codes covering standard setting, assurances, impacts, and more. Its code-compliant members have demonstrated achievement of this high bar.
There are two other key attributes that leading programs have. The first is that there must be credible independent, third-party systems in place to provide assurances about the production system and the products they provide to buyers. These assurances must also cover the supply chains that deliver them. Simply put, if you do not know where your seafood has come from, any other claim you wish to make is meaningless.
Currently, as is the case with the shared platform that ASC and MSC use, this is based around in-person audits. Supply chain assurances must also evolve to provide comprehensive social assurances – a task that ASC is committed to driving. We must also move away from paper-based audit processes, especially for high-risk supply chains. Digital traceability provides many additional advantages, not least of which include increased transparency and near real-time verification. ASC has invested in a GDST-compatible and -interoperable system that has been successfully piloted in Vietnamese farms and downstream supply chains. Future pilots will develop solutions to improve increased visibility for retail and foodservice businesses.
The second key attribute is that transparency must be embedded across the entire certification program. Without transparency, how do you know that a certification program is delivering on its promise? How can it be held accountable? With increasing scrutiny around social compliance, transparency plays a vital role in establishing what has been reported and what is known as a result.
This is why all ASC documents and audit reports are publicly available through its website, including certification decisions about any suspensions or terminations, along with the reasons why. Draft audit reports are also published before they are finalized, which can provide a check and balance and a degree of accountability toward the audit.
Social responsibility is a critical component of our robust standards, and ASC takes issues related to human rights extremely seriously. Audits of farms and feed mills must include a trained social auditor, and the team must have relevant language skills and experience to conduct worker interviews. The necessary skills required of ASC auditors are significant and leading. A total of 10 percent of all ASC audits are unannounced.
Collectively, these requirements provide for robust site investigations but provide no absolute guarantees. Abuses of human rights are regulated against in almost all countries but still prevail. Illegal activities are deliberately hidden and can be difficult to identify. Despite these critical challenges, ASC’s certification scheme has an important role to play in driving improvement in social responsibility throughout the farmed seafood industry. Through our impact reporting, we can demonstrate that we are making a positive difference, but clearly, more can be done.
We recognize that no system is perfect and additional approaches are needed to improve supply chain assurances. While constant improvement is built into ASC’s certification program, a key and critical future development will be the incorporation of how worker external grievance mechanisms are made available to workers and communities and how certification programs can verify their use and efficacy. Such mechanisms supplement certification processes and provide opportunities for abuses to be disclosed confidentially by workers and for remedy to be applied.
The seafood sector has been slow in the adoption of such mechanisms, which are better developed for land-based crop and livestock farming. They require resourcing initially to investigate the prevalence of such mechanisms from other sectors in key geographies and to ascertain both their ability to embrace the inclusion of seafood and to understand their current performance.
Work is also needed to either support the inclusion of the seafood sector within existing mechanisms or promote their development. CRC members are currently seeking funding to undertake the former study as a starting point.
Beyond access to functioning and inclusive grievance mechanisms, both workers and employers need to be aware of human rights, and workers must be empowered to speak up for these rights – individually and collectively – to prevent rights abuses. Access to and membership of trade unions and the capacity and opportunity for collective bargaining are critical mechanisms that ASC requires across its standards. We are continuously working to improve both the standard and our wider human rights programming.
Finally, we will use all resources available to investigate reported incidents and mitigate and avoid these unacceptable practices occurring on ASC-certified farms. In line with our ethos of transparency, all related findings will be published on the ASC website.
