Sustainable seafood: making things possible
There are, after all, not so many fish in the sea, says Michael Farquar, CEO of the Two Oceans Aquarium. We have hopelessly mismanaged the ocean and its resources.
But to some extent, we can put back the clock, as then Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Valli Moosa illustrated when in 2000 he intervened in what was defined as a linefish emergency. Some species have been brought back from the brink through the protections then imposed.
Although changing the trajectory of global damage is long, slow work, and needs mass commitment, it is a challenge the V&A Waterfront has joined, using the mechanisms it has at its disposal which include consumer power, the convening of goodwill, and supply chain. As a precinct that is home to 100+ eateries and some grocers, the V&A has been wrestling with what it can do to nudge customers, retailers and restaurateurs towards being more conscious of how their choices affect the environment.
To launch its Sustainable Seafood Festival 2024, the V&A convened a panel of experts to ask them exactly this: what would make it easier for everyone across the V&A value chain to make choices that positively support the ocean ecosystem, both social and environmental?
Introducing the panel discussion at Makers Landing, Farquar shared an alarming litany of ocean depletion:
- 80% of the world’s fisheries are already fully exploited, depleted or collapsed;
- nevertheless, there’s vast wastage: 35% of all sea life caught is discarded as bycatch;
- within South African waters, 34% of “our” fish stocks are depleted or heavily depleted;
- abalone stocks have been decimated through poaching; and
- West Coast rock lobster is at just 2% of the original stocks,
The implication of collapse, clearly an ecological disaster, is also of pressing social concern: the fishing sector is worth R6bn a year, directly employs 40 000 people, and indirectly creates jobs for more than 100 000. The economic survival of entire coastal communities is at stake.
So. Looking to the aggregate power of a precinct such as the V&A, the panel, which represented a cross-section of industry experts, was asked: What is one thing that the V&A Waterfront must do to support their food ecosystem in serving only sustainable seafood? Are we asking the right questions to drive this intention forward? And, how do we know we can trust the answers?
EDUCATION
Some of the answer, said Greg Henderson of the SA Chefs Association, lies in educating chefs around sustainable species and the avoidance of waste. “How can we buy better? How can we use the whole product?” And, when all food value has been extracted, how can what remains be put back into the soil in support of regenerative farming practices? “We must think wiser, cook even wiser, and be intentional with what we do with what’s left afterwards,” he said.
Through chefs showing commitment to good practices, customers will be influenced to demand these good practices, Henderson argued. With well over 100 kitchens operating on the precinct, many of which sell seafood, good practices like this could make a measurable difference.
Mark Botha, CEO of the SA Fisheries Development Fund (SAFDF), raised a hand for the need to simultaneously educate consumers. “Harvesting practices are driven by the consumer,” he said. “How do we use the power of the Waterfront to change the consumer, to change harvesting practices?”
Deputy Minister Narend Singh of the Department of Forestry, Fishing and Environment (DFFE) added that when it came to broad education about the finite treasure that is the ocean, the place to start consumer education was with young people. “Children teach their parents,” he said, “and their grandparents;” and he shared an anecdote of an educational scolding he got from his own grandchild over putting a piece of wastepaper in the wrong bin.
PARTNERSHIPS
Abalobi is built on partnerships and relationships, said Chris Kastern, Director of Growth for the organisation committed to small-scale fishing communities; it believes partnerships and storytelling are two of the most powerful tools available to us in the campaign to nudge ocean-positive behaviours.
“The Waterfront can nurture, develop and resource partnerships firstly with regional and national levels of government, secondly with organisations that could advise on sustainability in the areas of legality, traceability, and bringing seafood to market; and thirdly with restaurants and food retailers,” he said. It is those collaborations, he believes that nudge the whole system in the right direction.
SAFDF’s Botha added a point on how partnerships allow for the development and adoption of ethical codes in support of seafood management – codes that reflect labour practices (paying suppliers properly and on time), traceability, harvesting practices, equipment used, carbon footprint and more. Within the ecosystem of seafood-selling restaurants at the V&A, he asked, could this not become a requirement?
BROADEN BUYERS’ HORIZONS
Botha also made a strong pitch for the creation of a fresh seafood market at the Waterfront. “The buying power of such a market could shift focus to under-exploited fish,” he argued. “We’re attracted to what we know there is a market for, but a fresh fish market could change that narrative. The interplay between harvesters and chefs could push up value of fish we currently don’t fully understand.”
Singh endorsed the market concept. “Small-scale fishers ask for markets and opportunities,” he said. “A place like Waterfront, with its buying power, can buy from and encourage them. And it would help them move towards sustainable options, as it opened up understanding about relatively unknown seafood.”
COMMIT TO STORYTELLING
Winning hearts and minds, said Kastern, requires us to know and to tell the stories. So this is something the V&A could drive among its seafood sellers: finding out and sharing what impact the restaurant’s purchases are having on the coastal communities; the jobs that are being created; the improved food security status of fisher families. A restaurant or fish seller which cares to find out these stories will find they resonate; customers will start to ask those questions themselves; and a virtuous cycle will find momentum.
Fishers, he added, were tremendously inspired by the outcomes that flow when their stories get told. “For example, Greg (Henderson) gets his front-of-house team to communicate the stories behind the seafood that is being served, and has found a way for the guests to communicate directly with the fisher. The stories that come out of this are beautiful.”
Beyond the harvester’s stories are also the species stories. Some species take longer to recover, for example, said Henderson – and if it takes 14 years for a certain fish to reach maturity, is it ever “sustainable” to catch and serve it? And then there is seasonality: “We shouldn’t have more than three things from a single ecosystem on a menu at any one time,” he said.
As consumers become more tuned in to the stories behind what they find on their plates, so the ability to trust – to know that greenwashing isn’t happening, that there is integrity and commitment – becomes ever more important. “Trust is having a tangible relationship between the buyer and the provider, said Botha. “Questions must be answerable. Every fish we sell is traceable to the trawler, the captain and the date of catch.”
Not all sellers are as transparent; that, again, may be something to explore for inclusion in an ethical code that applies to all who sell fish at the V&A.
There will, of course, be continued demand for products not produced locally, such as prawns and squid. There the onus shifts to the buyer who should ask the questions about where the product comes from, and how it was caught?
LOOKING BEYOND THE PRECINCT
Singh leads DFFE’s charge in support of sustainable seafood, and noted challenges around illegal trawling of foreign fishing ships in South Africa’s protected waters.
He also acknowledged the power of top-down management such as fishing moratoriums over breeding seasons; and mentioned a pending Bill to Cabinet for the regulation of and provision of opportunities for people exploring opportunities in aquaculture along the coast, and inland. Aquaculture, he said, held exciting potential: on behalf of the government he had in fact signed an agreement with the government of Chile around the exchange of research and learnings.
The elephant in the room in any discussion about fishing is poaching, and the connection between that and illegal activities in the ocean with the financial hardship fisher communities face in part because of climate change, and in part because of the highly political quota system. “Illegal activity will only stop,” said Singh, “when we have provided opportunities for people to make a decent living legally.”
IN CONCLUSION
As panelist Petro Myburgh, Sustainability lead at the V&A pointed out, seafood is part of a bigger system that also includes how we think about energy generation and use, water management, waste management, fairness and equity. It’s not enough just to choose a fish that we understand to be currently abundant.
We need to ask questions – specifically, the four questions raised by the panel that draw from WWF’s SA Sustainable Seafood Initiative and Abalobi’s focus: What is the species? Where was it caught? How was it caught? Who caught it?
We need to be curious. Understand that “sustainability’ goes beyond the fish on the line to the community that depends on fishing for a living, and the other species, like penguins, for which stocks of the right kind of fish have to be at a level that supports their own needs.
We need to accept that we don’t have the answers but that, through working together, telling and listening to stories, bringing good conscience to decision-making, we can together shift things in the right direction.
The Waterfront as a convening entity needs to continue to provide opportunity, and to advocate around ethical issues. It needs to find ways in which the ecosystem and group purchasing power can be leveraged to make things easier for seafood sellers to do the right thing. And, if other measures fail, consensus was that it should consider making it a formal requirement that those trading in seafood step up to join the global effort to save our seas.
This panel discussion constituted the launch of the V&A Waterfront’s 2nd annual Sustainable Seafood Festival. At the first, we set out to answer the following question: what does sustainable mean anyway? Find that discussion here.