How sustainable are the fish your supermarket is selling?
Supermarkets are now the biggest retailers of fish in the UK. The Seafood Industry Authority puts the total UK fresh and frozen seafood market at £1.82 billion in 2004/05, an increase of 6percent on the previous year. Nearly 90 percent of those sales are made through supermarkets. Tesco has the largest retail share and the highest growth, but is followed by Sainsbury's, Asda, Safeway/Morrisons and Marks and Spencer.
This places a great deal of responsibility for fishing and how it is conducted, firmly at the supermarkets doors. Globally, destructive fishing practices and overfishing are having a huge impact on ocean biodiversity and are recognised as a key threat to the marine environment alongside climate change. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) statistics show that ¾ of commercially valuable fish stocks are either fully exploited or over-exploited and that worldwide up to 90 per cent of stocks of large predatory fish have already been lost. At the same time, seafood consumption in the UK continues to rise each year.
Despite increasing public, political and corporate recognition of the threat to the marine environment from unsustainable fishing, it wasn't until Greenpeace launched its supermarkets seafood campaign in October 2005 and produced a league table ranking companies according to their procurement policies that most UK retailers (with exception of M&S and Waitrose) began to take the issue of sustainable seafood procurement seriously. Although all the major supermarkets now have policies in place, they now need to implement them throughout their entire range of seafood. In practise, this means that many of the seafood species that can currently be found on the shelves of UK supermarkets continue to come from massively over exploited stocks or are caught using fishing methods that are highly destructive of the marine environment.
Our challenge to supermarket bosses is clear: This is an urgent issue - your new sustainable seafood procurement policies must be implemented across the full range of seafood sold in your supermarkets, from fresh cod fillets to tuna sandwiches.
Fisheries in trouble
Commercial fisheries practices have rarely been sustainable. Over the last 50 years, increasing advances in technology have allowed fleets to fish further out to sea for a longer time, and to hunt fish with increasing efficiency using sonar. Despite this increasing effort and efficiency, global seafood catches have been decreasing since the 1980s. As fisheries become depleted and some stocks, such as cod in the Grand Banks of the North West Atlantic, experience complete crashes, fisheries continue to expand into distant oceans looking for new marine species to exploit. As large predatory fish disappear, smaller faster-growing fish and invertebrates have been increasingly targeted, a trend described as 'fishing down the food web.' In addition to over-fishing, damaging fishing methods are destroying marine ecosystems and killing vast amounts of juvenile fish and non-target species, through accidental capture or 'bycatch'.
The most damaging fishing method, bottom trawling, not only takes vast amounts of bottom-dwelling bycatch, but the various combinations of chains, beams and heavy rollers destroy the physical environment of the seafloor - stirring up sediment on sandy bottoms or crushing cold water coral reefs on seamounts, for example. Other less physically damaging methods such as pelagic (mid-water) trawls for schooling fish like mackerel, and set (non-towed) nets like gill nets may still have high levels of bycatch, including threatened species such as sharks, turtles and marine mammals. Yet another fishing method called long-lining (long lines of baited hooks) is particularly hazardous to seabirds. It is clear that we urgently need to address the damage that commercial fishing is doing to our oceans and that supermarkets have a key role to play in changing the way we catch and consume seafood.
