The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) announced a new collaboration with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at Seafood Expo Global in Barcelona Spain, on 26 April, 2022.
The FAO is collaborating with SFP to adopt the standards used in FishSource to establish unique, standardized IDs for the world’s major fisheries. These universal IDs will streamline seafood supply chains, increase transparency, and improve government data collection, SFP said. The IDs will be available to the public, and will not change to standardize data collection. This will help ensure discussion about certain fisheries across the industry, governments, NGOs, and others is actually about the same fisheries and stocks.
“We need to know the source stock and fishery of a product to determine seafood sustainability. And for 15 years, SFP has been systematically doing this for the seafood industry with our tools and services,” SFP Global Policy Director Braddock Spear said. “With the FAO’s collaboration with FishSource, soon the entire supply chain can use the same IDs and codes and know we are talking about the same stocks and fisheries.”
The IDs will also be available for use across organizations to inform reporting and recommendations for achieving global targets, such as the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and SFP’s Target 75, the group said.