Canned tuna bearing the seal of the AENOR Atún de Pesca Responsible (APR) certification will make it into Spanish supermarkets this summer, two years after the Spanish tuna consortium OPAGAC announced the certification’s creation at the 2017 Our Oceans summit.
The APR standard seeks to implement best practices in the purse-seine tuna fleet, with special attention paid to labor and social issues. The certification establishes the International Labor Organization’s Convention 188 as its for its requirements on social conditions and maritime safety, and sanitary conditions to be met by freezer tuna seiners, both Spanish and foreign, in the responsible fishing of tunas of skipjack, yellowfin, and bigeye tuna. The certification’s standards also include requirements on fisheries control and good fishing practices.
The certification is overseen by the Asociación Española de Normalización y Certificatión (AENOR), a Spanish association for standardization and certification. The entire OPAGAC fleet of 47 tuna-fishing vessels received APR certification in 2017; the first canning companies will undergo AENOR certification audits in the next few weeks, OPAGAC said in a press release. With their certification, OPAGAC will have achieved certification for its full chain of custody, it said, as supermarket chain Grupo Calvo received APR certification in 2017.
“When that happens, the fleet will have closed the circle on this project,” it said. “Then the whole tuna canning process will be covered, from the ocean to the shopping basket.”
The new cans will carry the APR AENOR Conform certificate, which includes the phrase “Responsibly-Fished Tuna,” as well as a QR code consumers can use to access information about the product, its origin, and how it was processed.
“The AENOR Responsibly Fished Tuna certificate again guarantees that consumers are getting something good,” AENOR Agrofood Industry and Distribution Director David Verano said. “The tuna fleet and the canning companies in OPAGAC have voluntarily undergone an examination administered by an independent third party and acknowledged by consumers. This is their way of publicly declaring their firm, long-term commitment to sustainability and social responsibility in the fishing industry, in tune with the values of today’s society.”
OPAGAC Managing Director Julio Morón said the initiative came out of his organization’s backing of the United Nations Global Compact and its Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030, and its own efforts on its fisheries improvement project, which it created in 2016.
“No fishery has a future if it doesn’t work sustainably with the sea and deal responsibly with its employees and the economic and social development of its fishing zones,” Morón said. “We’ve become the first fleet to certify this approach to responsible fishing, and we’re placing the decision to support it in the hands of consumers.”
For its work, OPAGAC was named a Seafood Champions Award finalist at at the 2019 Seafood Expo North America. It faces off against three other finalists in the Vision category, with the winner announced at the 2019 SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, in June.
