Five of the largest players in the seafood sector have come together to support efforts to improve safety at sea.
The Global Tuna Alliance (GTA), Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS), The Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative (GSSI), Sea Pact and Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) – between them representing more than 150 seafood producers – are pushing for supporting continued and consistent data collection and analysis of fatalities in the industry, and actions to significantly reduce the risk of future incidents. The information will help understand the drivers behind the unacceptably high death rates, and then to design solutions to those drivers.
‘Fishing is and always has been a dangerous occupation but we can do better to reduce the current rate of fatal incidents. We must all work together to improve fisher safety and reduce the number of lives lost at sea,’ said Herman Wisse, executive director GSSI, one of the collaborating organisations.
‘We have delivered a statement to the FAO Committee on Fisheries this week on behalf of multiple industry companies to support the development of a global mechanism to report fatalities at sea. That, in turn, will help understand the drivers behind the dangers and design solutions to improve safety at sea.’
The safety has been a problem for the wild capture seafood industry for many years.
Research by the ILO in 1999, and subsequently by the FAO, estimated that annual fisher deaths were in the region of 24,000 and 32,000 respectively, or 65 and 87 deaths per day – but new research from The Pew Charitable Trusts, in conjunction with the Fish Safety Foundation, estimates that global fishing industry mortality rates are actually three to four times higher than these previous assessments.
The FAO has included the topic of fisher safety in its agenda for the upcoming Committee on Fisheries meeting, and the coalition is supporting calls for a global mechanism for reporting fatalities alongside targeted and effective safety initiatives based on the data generated, to make the work of fishing safer.
We hope that our intervention will help to ensure that this topic receives the required level of attention by fishing nations and other stakeholders.
‘As a coalition of seafood entities, we are committed to ensuring that the seafood we catch, grow, buy, and sell is responsibly produced without activities such as IUU fishing or modern slavery,’the group states.
‘As part of these commitments, we recognise that IUU fishing and modern slavery expose fishers to unsafe and harmful working conditions. We have aligned with FAO and the Ocean Panel, along with others, to advocate for the ratification and effective implementation of FAO Port State Measures Agreement and devised other measures to address IUU fishing and modern slavery, which will help to improve fishers’ safety.’
They continue by stating that by building on the existing national reporting systems already in place, they support the development of a global mechanism throughout the seafood sector that can establish a data collection scheme and repository on global fisher mortality incidents to help with analyses of loss of life in the fishing industry, leading to improved safety initiative development and implementation.
