UN FAO “we are fixing sustainability issues in developed regions, but we are not achieving the same success in developing regions.”
Manual Barange, the policy and resource director at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Fisheries and Aquaculture division, highlighted the widening gap between developed and developing nation seafood sustainability during his keynote address at FAO’s International Symposium on Sustainable Fisheries in Rome, Italy recently.
The reason for this gap is a logical one. There are millions of small scale seafood producers — fishers and farmers — in developing nations, and while they almost all have mobile phones, they generally cannot afford even the most basic electronic Catch Documentation & Traceability (eCDT) technologies. So we have greater than 90% of the worlds seafood coming from developing nations and no mechanism to collect data from the source — no data = no management = questionable sustainability.
Eachmile Technologies was invited (but couldn’t attend due to other commitments following on from Our Ocean) to the Rome conference to discuss the importance of incentives for these small scale producers, and how the mFish blockchain traceability application uses a token incentive mechanism as perhaps the most important tool to gain the wide spread adoption of eCDT systems at an individual or company level, as both must see an incentive or demonstrate a return on investment respectively.
It is vitally important to understand, if we do not have traceability to the very start of supply chains, not just of products alone, but of their ingredients (farming), we do not have traceability — and this means the ingredients of the feed used in aquaculture. And although we have traceability of the product we may not know if the product is sustainably and responsibly produced and harvested or not.
With the likelihood that over 95% of the seafood produced on the planet is emanating from developing nations it is mission critical to find ways to reach this first mile.
It is has been Eachmile’s mission to help find solutions to these challenges. The mFish initiative and underlying TRACE Protocol have been designed to address the accessibility and incentive challenges. We are also addressing the key challenge of who pays what, when, where and how in seafood supply chains with digital tokens being the medium of exchange for the key data elements, allowing the market to price the data, and use the system as and when they need to. The development of distributed ledger technology allows mFish to create these digital tokens on purchase and destroy them on redemption thereby providing stable incentivising functionality for harvest data traceability from the first, to the last mile.
It is a big challenge and no single entity can do this alone. And a challenging first mile is not unique to seafood. Eachmile is collaborating with telcos, retailers and other industry stakeholders to provide a baseline solution for all of their goods. Ultimately, it will take the collaboration of industry, fintech, non-government organisations and governments- which includes the important collaboration with many United Nations FAO, UN Global Compact (“full” seafood traceability is the first of their 5 tipping points for sustainable oceans) and UN Development Programme initiatives, that are helping to highlight and drive this forward to become a reality.
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