A lack of documentation on sustainable sourcing and responsible operation is a major challenge for Grupo Nueva Pescanova as it seeks to up its sourcing of sustainable seafood, according to Nuno Cosme, the company’s head of corporate social responsibility.
Pontevedra, Spain-based Nueva Pescanova, which sells a diversified line of seafood products in addition to operating 72 vessels internationally, farming 7,000 hectares of fish farms, and running 16 processing plants, had profits exceeding EUR 1 billion (USD 1.2 billion) in 2017.
Cosme is heading the company’s new “Pescanova Blue” CSR strategy, which commits the firm to sustainability in its fishing and aquaculture operations. However, the task is a complicated one, Cosme said. There’s an ongoing shortage of certified-sustainable stocks, making sourcing difficult. Cosme said he has encountered numerous unsustainable artisanal fisheries and “harmful practices” like non-compliance with rules on fishing moratoriums and minimum sizes.
Likewise, “bycatch is often an important protein source for local populations,” he said.
While there’s a large concentration of Marine Stewardship Council-certified fisheries in the Northern Hemisphere, MSC has a less significant presence in the rest of the world, Cosme said. There are numerous trawler-related fishery improvement projects (FIPs) concentrated in North and South America, but overall, Cosme criticized the seafood industry’s overall limited engagement in FIPs. Cosme called for more data to be collected and shared regarding stock levels and health. More effort is needed to ensure the build-up of “regional scale” in sustainable fisheries open to firms like Pescanova, according to Cosme.
Cosme also cited a lack of evidence on certain species such as cephalopods – a gap also noted by the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), which in January 2018 launched an effort to better catalog data on squid fisheries. Cosme said his company has begun collaborating with SFP on its Target 75 initiative, which has set the goal of seeing 75 percent of the world’s seafood sourced sustainably or improving toward sustainability by 2020.
