Can Corporations Save the Fish?

I know, a few sustainability advocates can already feel their hair raising from that headline. But consider this article by Nicholas Day at Yale's Environment 360.

Worried about the reliability of future supplies, major corporations — including Wal-Mart, Unilever, and McDonald’s — are increasingly using their economic clout to bring about change in an industry that has a long history of decimating the very resource on which its business has been built.

He makes the point that I've been hoping to make for some time. That is, "it is far easier to improve fisheries management by involving a few dozen companies and conservation groups than by targeting millions of shoppers in consumer campaigns."

Consumer campaigns help, but they are costly to wage and hard to get people aboard. Now, that doesn't mean they should be avoided but rather seen as part of a larger campaign of putting pressure on companies and coming up with solutions, like sustainable seafood.

Mark Powell, vice president for fish conservation at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, says that by using economic clout to push fisheries toward sustainability, corporations are helping achieve "the Holy Grail, which is actual, on-the-water improvement."

"It's true there's a limit—the ocean is not infinite,” says Powell. “But we could have as much sustainable seafood as we have total seafood right now.”

Hummm... Mark's a friend of mine, but I wonder. It might require making mackerel and sardines into a delicacy. Chefs, get busy.

Comments

[Hilary]

Yeah... sardines are hard to eat a lot of at once.

[Rodney North]

As someone who has worked towards reforming one corner of the food business for 12 years I have to contest the idea that "it is far easier to improve fisheries management by involving a few dozen companies and conservation groups than by targeting millions of shoppers in consumer campaigns."

I have heard this kind of argument before in many different arenas and while I understand its appeal I think it mis-understands, and mis-represents, how change usually happens, at least in the food industry.

For example, do you think large corporations would seriously consider embracing saving the fisheries, etc, in the ABSENCE of years of grassroots campaigns, public and trade education efforts and the hard and usually un-profitable pioneering work of small industry participants (small-scale responsible fishers, small processors, early-adopter retailers and chefs, etc.)?

The same arguments made here about the difficulty of mobilizing consumers have been made before, for example in the coffee industry where I work. In that case the large companies were repeatedly educated about the social and environmental problems of the coffee business, and asked to act, and yet they ignored it. They said 'your proposed solutions are not really necessary, are too expensive and THERE'S NO MARKET for 'responsible coffee' etc.

It was only later, after many years of grassroots education and after dozens of small entrepreneurs created organic and Fair Trade supply chains, and began to take market share and had demonstrated the commercial viability of their approach that the large corporations began to take some notice and take some small steps to cleaning up their act.

I may be wrong but my impression is that this is also largely how the organic movement took hold and how efforts to address animal welfare issues have progressed.

With that said for some other grocery store categories, like dolphin-safe tuna (which I believe was a top-down gov't imposed regulation prior to any broad or sustained public education), or recycled paper (which involves massive economies of scale that rule out tiny manufacturers for the most part) I do imagine its different.

So maybe someone can tell me which scenerio (coffee/organics or tuna) is more relevant to the goal of saving the fisheries.

Certainly you need to change the behavior of the large corporate players sooner of later (assuming you don't care to surplant them - but that's another argument) but I'd contend that they'll only budge AFTER you first won over some significant fraction of the public &/or of their customer base &/or of their investors.

Lastly, for what its worth its my sense that to get change rolling you don't need to sway but a small fraction, maybe 5%, of the public before the market dynamics begin to work in your favor and for purely commercial reasons corporations begin to change their behavior, even if it is only with token gestures at first.

[Samuel Fromartz]

Rodney,
Thanks for your comments. I think fish are somewhat different than coffee. Day makes the point that buyers were concerned about running out of fish, so had an incentive to buy sustainable stocks. I don't think that's the case with coffee -- that non-sustainable supplies are crashing by 97% (as they are with some fish).

Also, I think consumer campaigns work in prodding companies, but what I'd like to see is companies moving slightly faster than consumers and then convincing them to buy-in. But this isn't a rigid approach: in some cases consumers are ahead, and in others, retailers are.

I think it's also tougher to get the public behind fish than coffee. 1. If they eat fish, it's usually outside the home, so the sourcing decision is largely removed from them. And 2. fish, I would venture, are more confusing than coffee because there are so many species and populations, each of which can have particular issues. (Buying pole caught yellowtail tuna but avoiding long-line caught, for example). Buyers who are pushing sustainability are in a much better position to make those decisions.

I support consumer education and activism, but I think the lion's share of change in fish will come on the buyer/supplier side.

Ideally we'd just buy fish or coffee -- and it would be sustainable. No label needed because it was all done the right way. But obviously, that's a long way off.

[Rodney North]

Sam, Thanks for that added information. It does sound like the "leverage points" w/fish are different, and that the large corporations' dependency on a rapidly dwindling resource could motivate them to act faster than they tend to with slow-motion emergencies like, say, soil depletion from industrial-style farming.