5 Seafood Sustainability Practices to Use in Your Fishery Today

Seafood sustainability has become a hot topic in the food and beverage industry. While many companies want to meet and exceed these expectations, it can be difficult to find a good starting point. Sustainability is becoming increasingly important to consider in your business and operations plans, with many employees and purchasing managers making decisions based off of these commitments. In this article, we’ll be covering the benefits that come with seafood sustainability, and methods you can adopt today for seafood sustainability initiatives.

What Are the Benefits of Seafood Sustainability?
While the term seafood sustainability is used commonly throughout the industry, what constitutes as a sustainable practice is open to discussion. There are several subjective instances of sustainability, and arming your clients, your team, and yourself with knowledge is paramount to creating a tangible difference.

Regardless of individual preference for certain sustainable practices, there are several universally agreed upon benefits that come with sustainable practices. We’ve summarized a few of them below:

Reduced risk of extinction
Extinction can happen due to a variety of factors. Some of the most common factors include overfishing, natural cycles, or removal of key subspecies that feed into higher levels of the food chain. When sustainable practices are in place in a variety of fisheries, you can expect that this risk is significantly reduced. This is especially true for commonly enjoyed species and delicacies.

Responsible consumption practices
When sustainable seafood is available and more prevalent, you can enjoy the benefits of additional food to combat global hunger at a lower carbon footprint. Fish are collectively considered a low-carbon food. With sustainable consumption, even more of the population will have the opportunity to enjoy fish as opposed to other, more consumptive protein sources.

Additional job opportunities
Sustainability in fisheries can help to grow overall demand and buyer confidence. This is directly correlated to higher hiring rates, which have already raised due to the effects of the Great Resignation on the supply chain. You can use this point to boost employee morale and inspire them to work in a place with a global understanding of our mutual responsibility.

What Are Common Seafood Sustainability Practices?
There are several different areas that your business can focus on when it comes to seafood sustainability. Below are a few areas that you can use to begin your journey into a more sustainable seafood business.

Use technology and fish populated species
Your fishing practices should be built to be dynamic, and ethical. Fisheries can use technology and exclusionary devices to capture and source only populations that are currently populated enough to avoid the risk of extinction. Ethical fishing practices should also be considered in order to harvest the fish as effectively and humanely as possible. For example, you may consider alternative fishing practices such as:

● Hook and lining
● Harpooning
● Longlining
● Purse Seining

Find new ways to encourage a total-use policy
While fish is a low-carbon food source that is invaluable to the current population of consumers, you can reduce partial use wherever possible. This helps to make the catch stretch to the absolute furthest that it can, serving a variety of uses, such as compost and fishmeal, before it is determined to be unusable. Your business can collaborate with other entities to ensure that there is as minimal waste as possible.

Use lead-free alternatives
Many fishing methods use lead in catches, lures, or other components of the machinery and tools. This can be extremely detrimental to the health and safety of wild sea life and the local waters. The entire focus of sustainability is to minimize humanity’s impact as much as possible while still utilizing what we need ⸺ which is why taking precautionary measures to protect the local fauna and waters can go a long way. Other fish who are not in the catch can enjoy longer and healthier lives when harm-free catching methods are used.

Employ low-impact fishing methods
Mass fishing methods used by modern-day fisheries can cause mass casualties that aren’t a part of the catch. This is known as “by-fishing,” which occurs when fishing methods cause additional deaths that wont be used or harvested in any way. This is unnecessary and entirely avoidable by using more exacting fishing techniques.

Inecta Is Committed to Helping You To Stay Sustainable
Using cloud-based ERP software is often one of the most important and first steps that you can take toward the end goal of sustainability. The enhanced reach, knowledge, and transparency that ERP software provides is essential to helping your business process become more comprehensive and effective. For more information about what Inecta can do for your seafood business, contact us today.