Sustainable Seafood: Why Consumer's Choice Matters

Someone recently asked me if, knowing what I know about overfishing, I still eat seafood. My feeling is that, in this fish-eat-fish world, I’ll eat any marine wildlife that’s still got a fighting chance.

The problem is, with a globalized seafood market we usually don’t know what it is we’re eating. People will go to the Jersey shore, for example, and have shrimp from some estuary-polluting aquaculture farm in Ecuador, antibiotic-laden farmed salmon from Chile or fish & chips that uses pollack caught by huge factory trawlers in the Bering Sea. Instead, those New Jersey diners could have ordered blue crabs, quahog clams, local summer flounder, black seabass, monkfish or scup (a.k.a. porgy), all of which, according to Derry Bennet of the New Jersey Littoral Society, are from healthy, local populations.

To overcome this confusion and help consumers make choices that benefit our living seas, a number of campaigns have recently emerged, under the rubric of the Sustainable Seafoods movement. They can trace their origins to the highly successful consumer boycott of tuna that, in 1990, resulted in “Dolphin Safe” labeling, whose restrictions on netting have since saved an estimated 98,000 dolphins. A follow-up campaign sought “Turtle Safe” labeling of shrimp harvested using Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs). More recent boycotts have included “Give Swordfish a Break,” which contributed to the closure of swordfish nursery areas to fishing in 2000, and “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass,” much of which is actually slow-breeding Patagonian toothfish pirated from Antarctic waters. My favorite is “Caviar Emptor,” which asks connoisseurs to slather their crackers with American-farmed caviar rather than Russian or Iranian beluga, sevruga and osetra from sturgeon in the Caspian Sea, where the fish’s population has dwindled by more than 90 percent since the 1970s.

Some seafood-labeling programs have been attacked by foreign fishing corporations, which argue that requiring fishing boats to use gear that saves marine wildlife is an infringement on free trade. The World Trade Organization even ruled against the U.S. requirement that imported shrimp be caught with TEDs. That’s why hundreds of the protesters at the 1999 WTO demonstrations in Seattle were dressed as sea turtles. More recently, the Bush Administration has pushed to redefine the “Dolphin Safe” label to allow the same dolphin-encircling nets that led to the original boycott. In April 2003, however, a U.S. District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction maintaining the label’s standards pending a lawsuit brought by the Humane Society and other environmental groups.

Despite resistance from industry, the idea of labeling sustainable seafood has become increasingly popular, along with consumer guides to ecologically sound species published by the Audubon Society, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Environmental Defense and others. They suggest choosing wild Alaskan salmon, for example, rather than farmed salmon, whose wastes can pollute surrounding waters, or abundant calamari rather than overfished orange roughy or shark.

Recently, Monterey teamed up with three other aquariums to produce an updated West Coast sustainable seafood guide. Audubon and the Wildlife Conservation Society have put out an East Coast version, and other regional options are being developed from Hawaii to South Carolina.

Overfishing, explains Julie Packard, director of the Monterey Aquarium, is “an environmental problem whose solution is in people’s hands every time they buy seafood.”

Not everyone agrees with her.

“If the seafood is on the market, the American public should be happy to eat it. To say you shouldn’t eat an overfished stock is wrong,” argues William Hogarth, head of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). “Management works. We can rebuild stocks,” Hogarth adds.

This optimism is difficult to reconcile with evidence that commercial fishing fleets, subsidized by governments around the world and equipped with sonar, satellite and other military tracking technologies, are stripping the seas faster, in many cases, than the fish can reproduce. Some 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are now either maxed out or in a state of collapse, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Stocks of large predators—tuna, swordfish, cod, halibut, flounder—have been reduced by 90 percent worldwide due to industrial fishing, according to a new study published in Nature. According to NMFS, the cod population of New England’s Georges Bank has yet to recover, despite restrictions placed on its fishing since 1994. This year, Canada shut down all its cod fisheries to protect the species’ plummeting numbers. “We’ve seen species after species, such as the Georges Bank cod and Bocaccio rockfish on the Pacific Coast, that have collapsed under federal management,” says Susan Boa, program manager of the Seafood Choices Alliance (SCA). Lee Crockett, executive director of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, says that fisheries managers have allowed catches that were too large for too long, bringing about the collapse of these populations over the last decade or two.

“The problem is that NMFS is charged with both conservation and promotion of seafood consumption, but NMFS is also located within the U.S. Department of Commerce, where its commercial function dominates,” explains Jim Saxton, a Republican congressman from New Jersey and the ranking member of the Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife and Oceans Subcommittee of the House of Representatives.

For this reason, “We’re telling consumers that they can have a role, that business as usual isn’t going to cut it,” Boa says.

Established in 2001, SCA works with some 30 organizations involved in seafood campaigns as well as with 1,750 restaurants, retailers and wholesalers. Its goal is to simplify and coordinate the various seafood lists and environmental issues.

Three years ago, the consumer-labeling effort expanded under the sponsorship of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). The Council was set up by the World Wildlife Fund and the Dutch-based multinational Unilever, one of the largest commercial buyers of fish in the world. The first species to win MSC’s “Fish Forever” seal (certified sustainable by independent third parties) were West Australian rock lobster and Alaskan wild salmon. Among the first U.S. companies to use the “Fish Forever” seal was the Boston-based Legal Seafoods, which buys over 100 tons of fish and shellfish every week for its 26 restaurants.

“We’ve been in the fish business for fifty years, and I’m interested in being in the business another fifty years,” explains Legal’s CEO, Roger Berkowitz. “The only way we can do this is to participate in some kind of conservation effort. What I like about this program is that it’s a positive way we can help educate our consumers and also encourage fisheries to sustain themselves.”

Are consumer choices really having an impact on the fishing industry’s behavior?

“It’s hard to say what kind of market impact this is having. Most of these programs are less than five years old, which is why it’s still hard to measure market success,” Boa says, adding that SCA and others are working on it.

Gerry Leape, vice-president of the marine conservation program at the National Environmental Trust, believes that the Chilean Sea Bass campaign, which he oversees, is causing a measurable reduction in demand. After a period of several years that saw a near doubling of the catch imported into the U.S., 2002’s count was 11,500 tons, down from 12,000 the previous year.

Although some in the commercial fishing industry have expressed outrage at sustainable-seafood campaigns, others see advantages. “Where diverse opinions have been sought out, campaigns like the Monterey Aquarium’s have a lot of credibility,” says Pietro Parravano, a commercial fisherman from Half Moon Bay, California, and president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “We support campaigns that allow us to be stewards of the fisheries. I think the consumer can play an increasingly important role helping fish, fishermen and coastal communities.”

In the end, however members of the industry feel about consumers making environmentally sound seafood choices, the reality is that the fish belong to all of us. America’s Exclusive Economic Zone, which stretches from our shores 200 miles out to sea, is a publicly owned domain. These public waters are now threatened not only by overfishing but also by runoff pollution, coastal sprawl, loss of habitat and climate change. Solutions exist, but they are likely to be realized only when the public realizes that the future of our living seas is in our hands as well as on our plates.