Aquaculture

Creating employment for women at a shrimp farm, India
© courtesy of Network of Aquaculture Centers in Asia

The standards created through the Aquaculture Dialogues will be of little value if seafood buyers at grocery stores, restaurants and elsewhere are not willing to sell products certified against the standards.

That’s why WWF is engaging with seafood buyers to encourage them to get involved in the Dialogue process and support the Dialogue standards. WWF coordinates the Dialogues and is a stakeholder in the process.

Ultimately, WWF would like seafood buyers to purchase farmed seafood certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), the entity that will manage the Dialogue standards, or GLOBALGAP, which will certify farms prior to the upstart of the ASC. This support is a critical step in convincing producers that there is a market for certified seafood and that they, therefore, should adopt the Dialogue standards.

The first seafood buyers to become involved are:

• Costco Wholesale Corporation, the ninth largest retailer in the world, entered into a partnership with WWF in July 2010. The first goal of the arrangement is to gauge the degree to which Thailand-based companies that supply farmed shrimp to Costco meet the Shrimp Aquaculture Dialogue’s (ShAD) draft standards for shrimp farming. The ShAD is a network of approximately 400 shrimp farmers, non-governmental organizations, academics and others who have been working together since 2007 to develop global standards for shrimp farming. The global, performance-based standards will help minimize negative environmental and social impacts of shrimp farming.  The second goal is for WWF and Costco to develop a strategy to guide suppliers toward full compliance with the standards. Costco expects that, upon completion of this project, it will evaluate whether to incorporate ASC certification into its procurement policy.  
• The Kroger Company, one of the largest grocery retailers in the United States, entered into a partnership with WWF in October 2009 that calls for representatives from Kroger and/or its suppliers attending the Dialogue meetings and providing input on the draft standards documents. Kroger also will consider sourcing farmed seafood from producers certified against the final standards. Kroger also committed to additional work with WWF on wild-caught fish.
• Sysco Corporation, the largest food service distributor in the United States, entered into a partnership with WWF in April 2009 to develop a strategy for responsibly-sourced seafood.  Under the agreement, SYSCO will, among other things, support the Dialogues. “We support the tilapia standards because they will help us tell our customers the story they want and deserve to hear – that they are eating tilapia which was raised in an environmentally friendly way,” Craig Watson, vice president of agricultural sustainability at Sysco, said in the press release for the launch of the final tilapia Dialogue standards. “And with the ASC in place, we will have the assurance that the standards will be adhered to properly, which will bring credibility and longevity to the standards.”
• Marks & Spencer, one of the United Kingdom’s leading retailers, is participating in the Aquaculture Dialogues and several of the Dialogues’ technical working groups. It also is  reviewing and/or commenting on the draft standards for salmon, shrimp and trout. “The standard setting process for these species is going further than ever before in reaching out through a transparent, multi-stakeholder approach,” said Richard Luney, the wild fish and aquaculture manager for Marks & Spencer. Also, Luney said, “We support the development of the ASC and the ASC standards and, following full agreement on the detail of the relevant standards, we will work with WWF and the ASC to ensure that, by 2015, our company sources all of its farmed seafood from the most sustainable sources available.”
• Royal Greenland A/S, one of the largest retailers in Europe, participates in the shrimp, salmon and freshwater trout Dialogues by providing feedback on the draft standards developed by those Dialogues. “The standard setting process in the Aquaculture Dialogues is probably the most robust, transparent and universal approach involving a large and diverse group of stakeholders,” said Bruno Olesen, sales and marketing director for the company. Olesen also said, “Royal Greenland A/S will work with ASC certified farmed seafood products in order to achieve our objective to provide our customers with seafood from environmentally and socially sustainable sources.”
• Edeka, Germany’s largest supermarket chain, has announced that it supports the development of the ASC and will work with WWF to ensure that, by the end of 2010, the company sources all of its wild and farmed seafood from sources certified as sustainable.
• METRO Group, the fourth largest food retailer in the world, announced in October 2009 that it has asked its suppliers of farmed pangasius to begin the process of becoming certified by GLOBALGAP in preparation for the release of the final pangasius Dialogue standards. "The METRO Group supports robust and harmonized standards for food safety and sustainability, that are based on a wide stakeholder consultation process and operated under accredited third party certification regimes, “ said Hans-Juergen Matern, head of quality assurance for METRO Group. “This is needed to offer METRO customers and consumers a continuous choice of safe and sustainable products at an affordable price. Therefore, METRO welcomes the WWF initiated Aquaculture Dialogues and their latest move to cooperate with GLOBALGAP as one important route to deliver safe, environmental and social aquaculture products before the ASC will be set up and in full operation. At the same time METRO is the driving force for initiating a benchmark model to harmonize standards and reduce costs throughout the supply chain.
• Anova, the Dutch Sustainable Trade Initiative and GTZ have agreed to help pangasius farmers in Vietnam (including small-scale farmers) comply with standards for pangasius aquaculture created by the Pangasius Aquaculture Dialogue and GLOBALGAP. The partners will create a pilot project related to supply chain-based mechanism that can be applied to the whole pangasius industry.
• A representative from Birds Eye Iglo, the fourth largest seafood company in Europe, is actively involved in the pangasius Dialogue, where he is a member of the Dialogue’s Process Facilitation Group and one of the Dialogue’s Technical Working Groups.
• Royal Ahold, the 20^th largest supermarket chain in the world, reviewed the draft tilapia and pangasius standards and submitted comments to help strengthen the standards. “The standard setting process for new species such as shrimp, tilapia, and pangasius has gone further than ever before in reaching out through a transparent, multi-stakeholder approach,” Aldin Hilbrands of Royal Ahold said in a recent issue of the GLOBALGAP News magazine. “A recent example has been the agreement with WWF to offer voluntary assessment against the Aquaculture Dialogue sustainability standards for GLOBALGAP certified aquaculture suppliers.”
• The Findus Group, one of Europe’s largest frozen food and seafood companies, is helping to develop the shrimp and salmon Aquaculture Dialogue standards. The company also endorses progress towards a consumer facing sustainability marque for farmed fish through the establishment of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.

Learn more

• Read about WWF's conservation achievements in aquaculture
• Learn more about other WWF partners

For more information, please contact us at aquacultureinfo@wwfus.org