by Oliver Knowles, Oceans campaigner
Earlier this year I attended the Brussels Seafood Expo - the world's largest seafood and fishing exhibition. Held in 10 enormous exhibition halls over 3 days, retailers, processors, fishermen, exporters, importers and many more from around the globe come to buy, sell, talk about and eat massive quantities of seafood. And it's quite an experience.
For the past two years I've been working on Greenpeace UK's campaign to persuade our major supermarkets to sign up to sustainable seafood procurement polices. In that time, I've seen a lot of evidence that the world's oceans are being seriously damaged by massive overfishing. I've watched from the decks of North Sea trawlers as they hauled in their nets containing almost nothing but tiny juvenile fish, seen photos of massive pieces of ancient coral pulled up in bottom trawl nets, and examined dead dolphins killed by destructive fishing techniques. But nothing quite prepared me for the sheer size of the Brussels Seafood Expo - and the massive amount of seafood that was being bought and sold there. Seeing it happen on this scale made it very clear to me just how much effort is being put in to taking the marine life from our oceans. And just how much money is being made.
Walking through the exhibition my mood swayed rapidly, as if on a pendulum, between anger and renewed motivation to take on the destructive elements of this enormous industry, and almost total despair - that surely this exhibition was proof that we are simply taking way too much from our seas for them to be able to sustain this pressure for much longer.
Many stalls exhibited the products they were selling - so in aisle after aisle there were freezer and chiller units containing specimens of the world's marine species - everything from cod, haddock and plaice to enormous tuna fish, moon fish, and tropical varieties like parrot fish. All for sale. And much of it being cooked up on different stands for prospective customers to sample.
Attending the seafood expo gave our Oceans campaign team the opportunity to talk to talk to many of the big retailers, processors and fisherman and challenge them about what they are doing to ensure the seafood they sell is sustainable. Parts of the industry, particularly in the UK but also in several other European countries, are now beginning to actively engage in the debate and are looking for solutions to the many problems caused by overfishing.
Visiting the exhibition reinforced to me the importance of the work that we have done in the UK to get supermarkets to act responsibly, and adopt sustainable policies. By changing the fish and seafood that supermarkets sell we are beginning to send a very clear message all the way down the supply chain to the fishermen themselves that certain species, caught in certain ways, are no longer a marketable commodity. Only when fishermen realise there is no market for those species which are overexploited or caught using destructive fishing techniques, will they have the incentive to change their practices and stop fishing them.
This process of change is already well under way in the UK, as supermarkets improve their policies and start to remove some key 'red' list species such as skates and rays, dogfish, swordfish and marlin from their shelves.
The challenge now is to begin the process of change in other countries and we are starting to look at ways in which the work we have done in the UK can be run in different market places.
