Sustainable Fisheries Partnership today announced a new project geared toward improving fisheries that provide fishmeal in southeast Asia.
The partnership announced the South East Asia Fishery Improvement Project at the Asia Sustainable Fishmeal Roundtable in Bangkok. It will involve four separate projects, two in Vietnam and two in Thailand. The projects will assess their respective fisheries, create work plans for fisheries’ improvement and measure and report on the progress of the plans.
“The sustainability of aquaculture is crucially dependent on the good management of fisheries that provide fishmeal for feed,” said Duncan Leadbitter, the partnership’s technical director. “This project is intended to work with South East Asian fisheries that catch many species in trawling gear and have challenges that need to be resolved.”
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization will be coordinating the efforts, and will study other data collected on the fisheries such as state of fish stocks, landing volumes, and bycatch data.
Companies such as Walmart, Coop, and Sainsbury are also involved, supporting and communicating with the fisheries, Leadbitter said.
“It is really exciting that we have the whole supply chain mobilized to tackle this issue — retailers, processors and producers from Asia, Europe and the United States,” he said. “Given the very high level of industry support for this work I think we can be confident of making progress over the next five years.”
