SEAFOOD.COM NEWS– February 4, 2014 — The Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative is moving forward, and will have a major meeting in conjunction with the Boston Seafood Show to report on progress.
The GSSI is funded by the German government, 20 leading international seafood companies, Darden, Sodexo, 8 major global retailers, and industry groups including NFI and the Seafish authority.
The goal is to develop a benchmarking standard for seafood industry ecolabels based on at a minimum the FAO Guidelines on Aquaculture Certification and the FAO Guidelines for Ecolabelling of Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries.
The GSSI Benchmarking Framework will include “Key Performance Areas” on Aquaculture and Fishery standards and on Governance and Procedures. Each Key Performance Area will be broken down into a set of Benchmarking Indicators to which relative performance of certification programs can be measured.
GSSI has set up three expert working groups on Aquaculture, Marine Capture Fisheries, and Process.
The working groups will present an overview of their work at a meeting in conjunction with the Boston Seafood Show. The future of GSSI benchmarking received a boost when Walmart – which has not participated in the GSSI process – determined that for its purchasing policies, Alaska’s RFM certification system was equivalent to the system of the Marine Stewardship Council. Other major users, such as Sodexo, have also made this determination.
in their latest newsletter, GSSI detailed who will be the chair and vice-chair of the different working groups. In each case, they tried to pair an NGO with an industry partner. Aquaculture will be chaired by Iain Stone, of Lyons Seafood, and the vice-chair will be Anton Immink, from the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. Marine fisheries will be chaired by Randy Erickson, of the Wild Salmon Center, and the vice chair is Gregg Jeffers, from Gortons.
The Process group – which is working on how certification schemes will get benchmarked by GSSI, is chaired by Tom Pickerell, of Seafish, and Patrick Mallet of ISEAL alliance, and the vice chair is Mike Kraft, from Bumble Bee.
Finally, GSSI announced that WWF has come on board as a member of the steering committee. WWF is perhaps the key player in the global fisheries ecosystem movement – and although in the past they have been committed to the MSC – which they helped found, in recent years they have broadened their perspective to embrace a number of partnerships with industry players that go beyond simply asking their partners to use MSC approved sourcing.
In order for the GSSI to succeed, they will need to have WWF at least a neutral party, and the fact that after initially rejecting the need for GSSI, WWF has now come on board is a big step forward.
it is part of the recognition that a true formal global framework on seafood sustainability is needed that goes beyond the boundaries or promotion of any single scheme. Only in this fashion can governments formally use the benchmark, and can the benchmarks get incorporated – as the Global Gap has been for agriculture, and GFSI for food safety – into a wide range of purchasing programs.
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.