Fishcoin: Our Why

A brief on Why we do what we do…

Being able to track and trace your seafood is critical.

Traceability can be a very dry topic. Key Data Elements, Critical Tracking Events, syntactic and semantic interoperability etc. Before you switch off I will stop there (we will leave the exploration of technicalities and challenges to other posts). Essentially it is the ability to trace a product and, if applicable, its ingredients/components back to the source. Companies are required to track what comes into their company and what goes out — it’s called one-up, one-down traceability. In the food industry it is important for food recalls when there is a contaminant that can be harmful to consumers. So it is important.

So how could something so simple, mundane be that critical? Well let’s think about it, if we cannot trace our seafood (or any other product or ingredient for that matter) back to the source then how can we tell if it was legally produced? How can we be sure it was responsibly or sustainably caught or grown and not caught by slaves on fishing boats or processed by children? Without traceability we cannot come close to being sure. Indeed without traceability we have no ability to identify, verify and reward sustainable and responsible producers.

Modern day slavery affects more than 40 million people worldwide — more than at any other time in history.

Surely this is not a wide spread problem and the above only highlights some isolated cases in the developing world? Surely our trusted supermarkets, on-line stores, and brands check and make sure the products they sell us are legally and responsibly produced? Sadly, the lack of traceability or visibility in supply chains is staggering. A survey in 2017 showed that only 6% of firms said they had full supply chain visibility. This is complicated by the fact supply chains are global, and in the case of seafood, 95% of global production emanates out of developing nations, and of this, about 1 in 3 fish is from Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated fishing according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Destruction of pirate fishing vessels by the Indonesian Navy.

Challenges are not isolated to developing nations. An analysis of 44 studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries found that 36% were mislabelled, exposing seafood fraud on a vast global scale.

Mislabeling is one thing, it can be difficult as there’s over 12,000 species of seafood, but fraud is another matter.

So without traceability buyers and consumers cannot use their purchasing power to drive and reward more responsible production. It is like the steering wheel is disconnected from the wheels and our planet is driving toward a cliff. This is why we say it is mission critical. We need the traceability data to not only identify and reward more responsible producers, we also need the catch and effort data to manage our fisheries sustainably and transition to rights based fisheries management (ownership of the resource). We need to get time-temperature data from the fishers and farmers so we can move from risk-based use-by dates on products to evidence-based best-before dates and stop throwing away perfectly good produce and reduce the up to 60% of our seafood that is wasted through supply chains. We need the data to de-risk finance and assess risk for insurance. We need this to make the seafood industry more equitable, more sustainable, more responsible, and more profitable. And we need it now if we are going to avoid that cliff. This is our Why.

Up next will be the story of Our How — how Fishcoin does things differently.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please contact our team.