In the globalized, interconnected world of today, 13 seafood companies have an outsized role in determining the fate of Earth’s vast marine ecosystems. Just as keystone species in nature help to define and act as lynchpins for whole ecosystems, these corporations impact the structure, function and future of our submarine world.
In early September, ten CEOs of these leading seafood companies gathered in Japan under the auspices of the nonprofit coalition Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS) to address overfishing, illegal catches and the use of slave labor in the seafood industry. It was the group’s third gathering in a series known as the Keystone Dialogues, which are supported in part by the Moore Foundation through our Ocean and Seafood Markets Initiative.
This year’s meeting was marked by a number of corporate commitments that demonstrated the group’s increased and collective resolve to safeguard the seas and marine life from being overwhelmed by unsustainable fishing and aquaculture practices.
- The member groups agreed to assume stewardship of the SeaBOS organization, which was established and for the past three years coordinated under the auspices of the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University.
- Demonstrating his personal commitment to the initiative, Knut Nesse, CEO of Nutreco, the world’s largest fish feed producer, announced his resignation from Nutreco to assume the role of SeaBOS managing director starting in January 2019.
- Members named illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and modern slavery as their top priorities. Additionally, they pledged to apply traceability technologies to their global supply chains, piloting the efficacy of these new tools.
- Shigeru Ito, CEO and President of the Maruha Nichiro Corporation, the largest seafood company in the world, will serve as SeaBOS chair.
- Each company will contribute $50K a year for at least three years to support the initiative.
“At a time when political agendas tend to be inward looking, the SeaBOS initiative and these new commitments demonstrate the non-partisan, pivotal role that the scientific and business communities can play when they work together to address critical challenges,” noted Henrik Österblom, deputy science director for the Stockholm Resilience Centre, a public, independent research institute in Sweden, specializing in sustainable development and environmental issues.
Connecting science with industry leaders
Österblom and his colleagues at the Centre helped found SeaBOS following their influential 2015 scientific article Transnational Corporations as Keystone Actors in Marine Ecosystems. While the scientists had worked for twenty years researching and analyzing the impacts of ocean practices and good governance, most of that work was focused on local conditions. “We wanted to do something to address the problems impacting oceans globally, and we realized we had no idea who the biggest players were,” reflected Österblom.
After two years of investigative research, Österblom’s team, which includes colleagues from the Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere Program, and the Beijer Institute, both at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, found that even though the fishing industry is highly fragmented, with millions of small boats and subsistence fishermen, between 11 and 16 percent of the annual global catch is captured by just 13 companies that control upwards of 40 percent of market share for key seafood commodities including tuna, salmon and small pelagic fish like anchovies and mackerel.
Several of these companies are individually larger than most nations in terms of their global reach and influence over the seafood industry.
Armed with this information and the Centre’s renewed scientific understanding of the ecological dynamics at play in the underwater world, they set out to encourage the keystone seafood actors to assume a leadership role in good ocean stewardship.
The establishment of SeaBOS in 2016 marked the first time that companies from Asia, Europe and the US worked cooperatively to address the destructive environmental impacts of fish production at sea and on aquaculture farms.
Today, SeaBOS includes:
- The two biggest seafood companies by revenue Maruha Nichiro and Nippon Suisan Kaisha;
- two of the biggest tuna specialists, Thai Union Group and Dongwon Industries;
- the two biggest companies manufacturing feeds for aquaculture, Nutreco (parent company of Skretting) and Cargill Aqua Nutrition;
- the two biggest farmed salmon companies, Marine Harvest and Cermaq (subsidiary of Mitsubishi);
- and recently the Japanese tuna purse seine company Kyokuyo, as well as the agro-industrial conglomerate CP Foods.
“In the beginning we only had the CEOs engaged in strategic conversations about taking a larger responsibility for the ocean,” explained Österblom. “But then they asked us to set the bar even higher. In the last year, all the companies have started operationalizing the agreements, assigning staff to key roles in materiality assessments, monitoring and reporting efforts.”
While SeaBOS will function as an independent nonprofit, the Stockholm Resilience Centre will remain an important scientific partner in this ongoing effort to steward our seas. “It is still early days, but we have already seen some interesting progress,” said a cautiously optimistic Österblom. “We scientists regard this project as a large-scale experiment in how to enable systemic change. Our ambition is that it will generate important insights that can be replicated in other sectors and at other scales.”
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