Seafood certification with Aquatic Life Institute

Aquatic animals make up the overwhelming majority of animals in the global food system. Hundreds of billions of farmed shrimp and well over a trillion wild fishes are taken each year, and almost none of the sustainability frameworks that govern the industry say anything about how those animals are treated.

The strategy is upstream. Certification schemes, retailer sourcing policies and international bodies already set the standards that producers follow to reach market, so adding welfare criteria to those documents changes practice across thousands of operations at once. The work involves helping certifiers define what high welfare means in aquaculture and capture fisheries, benchmarking the major schemes against each other, working with retailers and producers on sourcing policies, and engaging bodies including the European Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

A separate strand works to stop commercial octopus farming before it establishes itself, through certification standards, legislation and scientific advocacy. Preventing an industry is far cheaper than reforming one, and octopuses are carnivorous, solitary and by most measures poorly suited to captivity, which makes this a rare chance to close a door while it is still ajar.

The organization behind this work is Aquatic Life Institute.

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