Brussels Seafood Expo 2007: the world's largest
Yesterday saw the start of the world's largest seafood trading event – the Brussels Seafood Expo 2007. Between the 24 and 26 April seafood companies from all over the planet will attend the Expo, where millions of euros worth of seafood are bought and sold. Much of this seafood comes from stocks that are massively over-exploited and caught using fishing gear that is highly destructive of the marine environment. So 35 Greenpeace campaigners from across Europe have converged on the site to engage with business people from the international seafood trade and ask them - what are you doing to make your industry more sustainable?
The Expo is a great opportunity for our campaigners to talk to hundreds of different businesses and challenge them on the sustainability of their seafood. We've set out to make sure that every company and every individual at the show is asked the question: Is your seafood sustainable? And if they think it is, we're asking them to prove it.
Some of the more progressive companies in the industry are already trying to source species that are fished in less destructive ways. For example, many businesses are no longer selling species that are caught using beam trawls – a particularly destructive and wasteful type of bottom trawling. Last week Sainsbury's announced that from next month all their fresh cod and haddock will be line-caught, rather than bottom-trawled. We'll be encouraging businesses to follow this example and adopt new policies on seafood that commit them to selling only sustainable products. Making these moves is not just good for the environment, it's good for long term future of the fishing industry. Without these changes, many fish stocks will collapse making them commercially useless.
New research shows that consumers are increasingly demanding sustainable seafood – a recent survey of European consumers showed that nearly 80 per cent of those surveyed consider the environmental impacts of their purchase to be an important factor in influencing what seafood they buy.
What you can do
If you eat fish, making sure that it comes from sustainable sources is not always easy. For advice on how to source seafood sustainably read:
Better buys: what fish can I eat?
Sustainable seafood: frequently asked questions
