A mid-sized Louisiana seafood processing plant’s loading docks appear surprisingly ordinary. Fish caught thousands of miles away are waiting to be distributed somewhere in the cold storage as trucks arrive and rubber-booted workers move between stacked crates. Here, nothing appears to be brittle. Everything appears to be under control. That’s why it’s so simple to overlook the underlying reality.
Environmental change poses a significant risk to over 90% of the world’s blue food production, including aquaculture and capture fisheries, according to UC Santa Barbara researchers. That figure, which was published in Nature Sustainability, is not a cautionary tale about some far-off future. It describes the present moment. The United States is one of the world’s most exposed countries, along with China and Thailand. which is remarkable given that the majority of American consumers still believe that seafood is consistently and consistently available.
The issues pile up in subtle ways. Sea level rise, changing ocean temperatures, and an increase in algal blooms are all subtly weakening the industry’s reliance on coastal infrastructure. These are not distinct crises. The same suppliers are impacted by these interrelated pressures that arrive at about the same time. The researchers claim that the risks to freshwater and marine fisheries in the United States are disproportionately high, especially when it comes to species invasion and warming waters. It’s possible that the industry hasn’t fully realized the operational implications of that.
The most traded food item in the world is seafood. Just that fact ought to draw more attention than it usually does. Before anyone at the retail end asks a single question about the fish’s true origin, it can be caught in the Pacific, processed in Southeast Asia, frozen, and transported to a distribution center in the Midwest of the United States. The intricacy is not coincidental. It is structural. Furthermore, risk is concealed in supply chain complexity.
In the industry, there is a belief that certifications address this issue. Companies that are serious about responsible sourcing rely heavily on third-party labels, such as MSC, ASC, and various fishery improvement projects. In order to map the actual locations of the risks in its own supply chain, Mars, which runs the largest pet care company in the world and sources massive amounts of fish byproducts, started collaborating with WWF in 2009. As their sustainability lead Andrew Russell put it, what they discovered showed them not only where they were succeeding but also where there were real issues. They are still working on it fifteen years later. You should learn something from that timeline.
Large-scale American suppliers deal with a more difficult-to-solve version of this issue. There are actual traceability gaps. It is still challenging to obtain trustworthy vessel-level data from far-off water fleets, especially those that operate close to borders with lax enforcement. Not only does illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing skew catch data, but it also indicates that someone is profiting from an unaccounted-for resource somewhere along the supply chain. Eventually, that manifests as scarcity.
It’s simple to ignore how much of this risk is concentrated in particular production systems. Stressors related to climate change are more prevalent in marine fisheries. Disease outbreaks and hypoxia—low oxygen levels that can quickly destroy fish stocks—are more likely to affect aquaculture. The majority of large American distributors, who are caught between the two production methods, lack risk diversification. They are simultaneously exposed to two distinct types of it.
It seems like the reckoning is happening more slowly than it should as one watches this industry deal with these pressures. The science is obvious. Vulnerabilities in the supply chain are recorded. Whether there are the financial incentives to promote the kind of industry-wide adaptation that researchers claim is desperately needed is still up for debate. To date, conservation partnerships and individual businesses have been largely responsible for holding the line.
