SEABOS AND GDST JOIN FORCES

SeaBOS and GDST join forces for seafood traceability. The Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS) and the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) are joining forces in support of seafood traceability.

These two leading seafood industry groups—which together include seven of the world’s ten largest seafood production companies with combined seafood sales of well over USD $35 billion per year—are now pledging to work jointly towards the adoption of global industry standards to improve the quality, efficiency, and affordability of seafood traceability.

These unprecedented pre-competitive voluntary standards will equip the seafood sector for the 21st Century’s globalized, information-based economy, and will help make digital seafood traceability a universal industry practice. Global industry standards for seafood traceability are urgently needed to eliminate costly and unnecessary barriers between the dozens of incompatible, proprietary traceability systems that exist today, and to help guide governments towards the harmonization of standards affecting seafood trade.

By creating a set of voluntary industry norms, the seafood sector will:

• Develop shared expectations about the kinds and quality of information entering seafood supply chains;
• Ensure that fishing and aquaculture enterprises around the world receive more consistent and predictable demands for the data accompanying their products;
• Create a level playing field that promotes equitable market access for large and small producers from diverse countries;
• Establish technical protocols for interoperability that will facilitate digital communication among thousands of actors across the seafood supply chain; and
• Provide a basis for more efficient and consistent regulatory practices among producer, processor, and market country governments.

Together, the SeaBOS and GDST initiatives currently represent more than five dozen companies from across the global seafood supply chain, ranging from major multinational players to representatives of small-scale producers in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

They say that reliable traceability is critical for effective supply chain management, and for ensuring that seafood is sourced from production practices that are legal, sustainable, and socially responsible.

SeaBOS was established in December 2016 under the auspices of the Keystone Dialogues to bring together the world’s largest and most influential seafood companies to help lead a global transformation towards sustainable seafood production and a healthy ocean. For more information, see http://keystonedialogues.earth/.

The GDST was launched in April 2017 as a broadly representative “business-tobusiness” forum charged with developing global voluntary seafood traceability standards and guidelines. The GDST’s output is slated for publication in late 2019 or early 2020. For more information, see https://traceability-dialogue.org/