GLOBAL fish stocks are not in good shape, yet the pressure is mounting to pull even more fish from the sea.
Not only is the rise in population pushing demand, but each person’s appetite for seafood is increasing. In 1960, when the world population was 3 billion, the average consumption of fish per person was 10kg a year. Today, with a population of 7.2 billion, it has increased to 19kg of fish a year.
Worldwide, 61 percent of fish stocks are at the limit of exploitation and 29 percent are over-exploited. How does one reverse this?
A few years ago, the local branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-SA) had an idea. Working on the premise that what people do not know about, they will not seek to influence, WWF-SA set about informing the public that they needed to think before they tucked into that seafood meal. Were the stocks of that fish declining? Were they fished in a manner that destroyed the marine ecosystem?
This led to WWF’s Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (Sassi). The programme’s first step was to produce a consumer seafood guide with the “traffic light” red, orange and green categories of seafood, red being species to avoid and green being those to buy.
It was an enormous success and many shoppers and restaurant clientele began asking whether the seafood they were considering buying was “on the green list”.
WWF-SA says this shift in consumer patterns triggered a reaction from retailers, who began to look for more sustainable suppliers to meet the changing consumer demand.
Then WWF-SA took a next step: It developed a programme for retailers and suppliers which gave them information about sustainable fish products and developed tools they could use to “go green”.
As WWF says, neither programmes are silver bullets, but they are two important steps towards a bigger goal: to drive change in what happens at sea.
The WWF-Sassi programme illustrates two important points: the first is the crucial role that an NGO can play in promoting sustainability; the second is the power of informed consumers, and how they can use this power for the good of the planet.