The Fishcoin Manifesto

manifesto [ man-uh-fes-toh ] a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization.

The above excerpt is from a discussion paper and part of an MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century and published two months before the new millennium when Amazon was only a digital bookstore, before Google took off, and other platforms like Uber, AirBnB turned the taxi and accommodation industries on their heads.

The authors stated in 1999 that today’s organizations are working very well. But few institutions anywhere — be they educational, governmental, community, or business institutions — are serving societies’ and individuals’ needs as well as they could. In particular, business institutions, while arguably the healthiest of society’s institutions, are operating far short of their potential to contribute broadly to societal well being.

Sixteen years later the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals were adopted. Although progress has been made the climate emergency and the global pandemic has set the world back significantly and impacted all three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. Indeed the UNEP predict SDG performance to be likely underestimated.

With regards to SDG 14 Life Below Water we are not faring well at all. The percentage of fish stocks within biologically sustainable levels has gone from 90% in 1990 to 65.8% in 2017, and yet we are discarding, losing or wasting up to 60% of our seafood through supply chains. Furthermore, approximately 30% of our seafood emanates from Illegal, Unreported & Unregulated sources, and up to 80% can be mislabelled.

Desperate measures. Indonesian navy using illegal fishing vessels as target practice.

So 22 years after the MIT Manifesto for Inventing Organizations for the 21st Century, how would we score ourselves? How would our corporations score themselves according to their own Mission, Vision and Value statements? What about us? What about our Mission, Vision & Values statements? Well we tried multiple times to write them and we seemed not to get them done. This might have been because we didn’t feel comfortable with who we were turning into through the process — to be brutally honest we started to feel like the BS artists that know little of the sector the corporate is in but are paid fortunes to spin a narrative for them. Why? Because we found ourselves reviewing these corporate statements, starting to use the same words, and had the feeling in the back of our minds that we needed the statements to appeal to investors, employees and society all at once.

Reading what the authors of the MIT paper wrote decades ago where they claimed that “highly efficient organizations are not achieving what we humans really want, that the current organization of economic activity is intensifying economic inequity and eroding critical environmental systems, it became clear to us that little had changed and that most of the corporate Mission, Vision and Value statements we read aren’t worth the paper they used to be written on.

In fact, things have worsened in many respects. Sadly the authors belief that the increasing divergence between the “haves” and “have-nots” within countries and around the world cannot continue without morally troubling inequities and, perhaps, major social disruptions has come true.

And we agree with the authors in that there is a clear need to invent organizations — and social systems within which they operate — that can be both economically efficient and also widely perceived as equitable. So rather than spinning out corporation-esque Mission, Vision and Values statements we decided to produce a Manifesto and tell you what we believe, and what we are trying to do to address the challenges. Basically, so we can hopefully look at our children and grandchildren in the eye and say that we did our best.

We believe he shouldn’t pay for a traceability system to get the data that we are demanding.

So what do we believe?

1. The Fishcoin Project team believes that ultimately industry must drive the change we need, and that platform approaches to trading can solve many of our ocean’s challenges. We believe that a trading platform that sells seafood for a fair and transparent commission is incentivised to assist producers/sellers (fishers, farmers, processors etc.) to produce legal, reported, regulated, and safe seafood of the highest quality, consistently, and in compliance to sustainability and responsibility standards demanded by the market.
2. The Fishcoin Project team believes that one of the greatest barriers to achieving data-driven trading platforms that integrate seafood supply and financial chains, is the lack of viable first mile traceability solutions for developing nation producers that produce over 90% of the world’s seafood and employs 95% of those engaged in the global seafood industry.
3. The Fishcoin Project team believes fishers and farmers in developing nations should not have to pay for traceability systems, and that the market should determine the value of the traceability data and reward those that share their data. Therefore we launched a token as part of a blockchain based traceability solution that is free to access and that rewards fishers and farmers for sharing their traceability data. Although blockchain traceability can be achieved for as low as one US cent (0.01 tokens), we believe the market will eventually determine a viable and fair market price for the data.
4. The Fishcoin Project team believes it is a responsibility to pay tax so governments can invest in fisheries research and development as well as cover the expense of monitoring, compliance and surveillance. The Fishcoin project earns revenues from transparent commissions when Fishcoin tokens are transferred and will pay tax on those commissions.
5. The Fishcoin Project team believes it is important to involve, support and reward developers around the world to build applications using the underlying Trace Protocol. It is our intention, where, and as much as possible, to help the technologically inclined daughter of a fisherman or son of a fish farmer to build applications for the fishers or farmers in their local community. We commit to splitting commissions with these developers and we commit to providing the tools, libraries and training to build solutions around standards such as those developed by the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST).
6. The Fishcoin Project team believes integration is also the key to achieving scale. We will integrate Fishcoin into existing traceability applications to help their users/subscribers offset or cover the costs of subscriptions to those applications, thus helping them to scale.
7. The Fishcoin Project team believe it is critical to put the fisher’s and farmer’s interests first, but that it is also critical to involve government and non-government actors. We believe the fishers and farmers should own their data but that the data needs to be shared with governments for informed policy generation, fisheries management purposes, and to transition to rights based fisheries management. We believe this can and must be achieved in a way that protects the fisher’s and farmer’s interests, yet meets the data protection and data sovereignty concerns and responsibilities of governments.
8. The Fishcoin Project team believes that blockchain technologies will enable fishers and farmers to become shareholders in the business of both traceability and trading. The project team is working on such solutions as well as solutions to help them secure access to fair finance and insurance.
9. The Fishcoin Project team believes in gender equality and that the empowerment of women will significantly advance society toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The Fishcoin team will work to ensure women in fishing and farming communities, as well as those in the supply chain and technology industries are included and rewarded.
10. The Fishcoin Project team believes in currency sovereignty and wishes to work with governments, government bodies, and their representatives on, inter alia, the creation of regulatory sandbox environments to allow the traceability utility token to be redeemed into fiat currencies with banks helping the unbanked become banked, or for the tokens to be redeemed for government e-vouchers such as food stamps, medical services etc.

Finally, the Fishcoin team believes in partnerships. We cannot do this alone. We want to and need to work with likeminded people to change the world for the better.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

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