Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Foundation

Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Foundation (SFP) is working to engage and catalyze global seafood supply chains in rebuilding depleted fish stocks and reducing the environmental impacts of fishing and fish farming, with major projects in Asia, Europe, and North and South America. SFP convenes, educates, and advises supply chain stakeholders, including major retailers, restaurant chains, seafood brand owners, buyers, producers (fishers), NGOs, and fisheries management and scientific institutions, to improve fisheries practices and policies.See Schedule O for continuation.Continued from Page 2SFP structures most of its work around five initiatives: 1. SFP launched the Target 75 (T75) initiative in 2017, as a dedicated and concrete benchmark on the way to our ultimate goal of 100-percent sustainable seafood. T75 seeks to create the large-scale change and momentum needed to achieve this goal. T75 aims to ensure that 75 percent of seafood (by volume) in 13 key sectors is either sustainable or making regular, verifiable improvements. Together, the T75 sectors cover most of the main types of seafood consumed in North America and Europe, and a significant portion of what is consumed in Japan.2. SFP's Protecting Ocean Wildlife initiative engages and mobilizes retailers, the seafood industry, and the entire seafood supply chain to reduce the worldwide bycatch of sharks, seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles. Current efforts include focusing on reducing bycatch in longline tuna fisheries, promoting gear innovation to reduce the risk of entanglement for critically endangered marine mammals, conducting bycatch audits of seafood supply chains, and rolling out the Bycatch Solutions Hub - a tool for connecting seafood companies and innovative fisheries around the world to reverse the decline of ocean wildlife.3. Supporting Small-Scale Fisheries: Alternative approaches are needed to ensure legal fishing rights and effective participation of small-scale fishers in the decision-making process, so that the needs of resource users and their communities are reflected in fisheries management. SFP's Supporting Small-Scale Fisheries initiative focuses on building the enabling conditions for positive change in fisheries governance systems and fairer distribution of benefits through effective co-management of fisheries. 4. Improving Fisheries Management: SFP works to improve fisheries policy and governance in key countries and at the regional level to achieve stronger environmental protections and enforcement, more sustainably managed stocks, and greater benefits for fishing communities. 5. Promoting Sustainable Aquaculture: SFP engages international markets, the middle of the seafood supply chain, fish farmers, and local communities to ensure a reliable and safe supply of farmed seafood. A key component of SFP's strategy includes improving access to information used to guide responsible seafood sourcing. SFP implements this strategy in a number of ways, including by catalyzing and advising industry-led fishery improvement projects (FIPs) and aquaculture improvement projects (AIPs); organizing fish buyers into Supply Chain Roundtables (SRs); sponsoring annual Fisheries Forum events; and maintaining FishSource, an online information resource that records the status of fish stocks. FIPs and AIPs are collaborations among relevant stakeholders to influence policies and management practices and improve the sustainability of fishing and fish farming operations. Once established, they function as a continuous improvement vehicle that aligns the interests of the supply chain. They set and implement their own improvement objectives (using public workplans and measurable milestones) and are designed to be led by industry and to outlive the initial involvement of NGOs such as SFP, functioning as long as necessary to achieve their sustainability goals. Worldwide, SFP is currently monitoring and advising improvement in 199 FIPs and 10 AIPs.SFP also organizes fish buyers into Supply Chain Roundtables (SRs), which oversee the creation of FIPs and AIPs in their areas and monitor progress. An SR is a forum for processors, importers, and others that buy directly from a specific seafood sector to work together in a pre-competitive environment to achieve improvements in fisheries or aquaculture. Currently, SFP works with approximately 11 SRs. In 2016, SFP began emphasizing industry-driven efforts over SFP initiating FIPs, AIPs, and similar projects on its own. SFP holds many meetings to coincide with the major annual seafood industry trade shows, such as Seafood Expo North America (Boston), Seafood Expo Global (Barcelona), and other industry events. This gives SR participants a chance to meet in-person to discuss progress and related issues, plus it gives SFP the chance to meet face-to-face with the participants to answer questions, provide updated data connected to a particular project, and offer additional information. Another important information tool SFP uses to inform improvement in fisheries is its FishSource program, an online information resource that records the status of fish stocks and fisheries and, since 2018, aquaculture units. SFP created FishSource (www.fishsource.org) 16 years ago, so that the seafood industry could access up-to-date, impartial, actionable information on the status of fisheries and the improvements that are needed to become sustainable. FishSource currently provides public information on 4,839 wild-capture fisheries. Since FishSource Aquaculture launched in 2018, 72 public profiles have been published. Examples of SFP's progress toward globally sustainable fisheries in 2022 include: * The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that it is adopting the standards used in FishSource to establish unique, standardized IDs for all of the world's major fisheries. The universal FAO IDs will be publicly available and will standardize data collection and identification of fisheries and stocks among industry, governments, NGOs, and other stakeholders. In recognition of these efforts on universal fishery IDs, SFP was named an ocean innovator by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).* Protecting Ocean Wildlife: At Seafood Expo North America in Boston, we brought retailers, suppliers, and experts together at our Bycatch Solutions Open House, which highlighted the latest gear innovations and bycatch solutions for addressing fisheries interactions with endangered, threatened, and protected (ETP) species. At the event, we unveiled our new Solve My Bycatch Problem tool, an online interactive tool to evaluate methods to reduce wildlife bycatch in tuna longline fisheries.* Supporting Small-Scale Fisheries: SFP supported Peruvian fishers to move forward in the process of attaining vessel licenses by helping to streamline the formalization processes, so as not to remain unregulated. The Peruvian government streamlined and facilitated the licensing process with the support of SFP through the transparency campaign pescaformal.pe. As a result, almost 3,000 vessels (85% of total vessels under formalization) obtained vessel licenses, and about 1,600 artisanal vessels obtained fishing licenses (64% of total vessels finalized the formalization).* Supporting Small-Scale Fisheries: SFP worked with research institutions in Peru and Ecuador, the Dolphinfish Research Program, and artisanal fishers on a pilot tagging project that targeted mahi-mahi in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, to increase scientific understanding about the mahi population in the region. The Indonesian Blue Swimming Crab (BSC) Fishers Communication Forum (Forkom Nelangsa), which was created with the support of SFP, released a video on how fishers can get out of debt.* Improving Fisheries Management: We are supporting the creation of Better Seafood Philippines (BSP), building on the United States Agency for International Development's Fish Right program. BSP uses market influence to support small-scale fishers and combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing by promoting transparent and sustainable seafood production and sourcing at all levels of the Philippines seafood supply chain.* Promoting Sustainable Aquaculture: New research from SFP's aquaculture team showed how landscape-level aquaculture management can contribute to the conservation and regeneration of mangrove forests, presenting a huge opportunity for the farmed shrimp industry to help bring back lost mangrove habitat.For further information on SFP and highlights of the past year, please visit www.sustainablefish.org to view our annual report.