Correspondence
Email sent to press office of Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The email asked how the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program accounts for concerns regarding labor abuses and forced labor in global seafood supply chain. Specifically, The Outlaw Ocean Project asked: 1. What steps has the Seafood Watch program taken to adjust their rankings and seafood recommendations to account for human rights and labor concerns? 2. Where has the Seafood Watch program not been able to accomplish what they’ve hoped to in order to address labor concerns in specific fisheries? 3. How were findings from the Seafood Slavery Risk Tool incorporated into Seafood Watch's seafood assessments, if at all? Will findings from the updated version, the Seafood Social Risk Tool, play more of a role in Seafood Watch's seafood recommendations? 4. How does the Seafood Watch Program plan to further incorporate labor concerns into their rankings of sustainable and legal seafood worth purchasing?
A spokersperson from the Monterey Bay Aquarium responded: 1. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program’s green, yellow and red seafood ratings assess the environmental impacts of fisheries and aquaculture supplying the U.S. market. Human rights and labor concerns are not factored into these sustainability ratings. As stories about human rights abuses in the seafood supply chain began to emerge, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s focus expanded in 2015 to include equity and human rights issues in seafood production. In 2017, a group of environmental and human rights groups, academics, and industry representatives gathered at the Aquarium to develop a definition of socially responsible seafood which became the Monterey Framework for Social Responsibility in Seafood. The Aquarium receives guidance from our Social Sustainability Advisory Group, a group of academic researchers, human rights professionals, worker and producers' organizations, industry representatives, economists, and others who provide valuable strategic guidance and expertise. This group has strongly advised us against building social and human rights indicators into Seafood Watch’s environmental ratings because it is not the right tool for such a complicated exercise. While there are clear linkages between social and environmental issues, they need to be evaluated using distinct indicators. A fishery or farm may have higher performance in one area and significant challenges to address in another. Transparency about the challenges that exist in both areas is critical. Instead, when the Aquarium’s Global Ocean Conservation team works directly in specific regions or countries to improve the environmental sustainability of fisheries and aquaculture, we also work to understand and address the underlying drivers of human rights violations and social inequities. We have developed resources, such as the Seafood Social Risk Tool, that can help businesses and policymakers learn more about how to identify and manage the risk of forced labor, human trafficking, and hazardous child labor in seafood supply chains.
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The Aquarium does not work to directly address labor concerns in specific fisheries. Rather, our goal is to provide actionable information that can be used by businesses to identify and address labor concerns in their seafood supply chains through efforts such as the Seafood Social Risk Tool. While we have been able to do this, there are a number of challenges to gathering and sharing this kind of actionable information: (1) It can be challenging to identify where actual abuses are happening because very little information exists about seafood workers’ living and working conditions across the many, sometimes opaque, layers of the seafood supply chain around the globe. (2) Over the past decade, publicly available information about severe human rights infringements, such as forced labor on board fishing vessels, has increased. However, the studies, reports, and news articles have only covered limited geographical areas and certain types of fishing and processing. (3) There are still significant data gaps in the sector in regards to general working conditions within specific production systems, including workforce composition, pay, and contracts. All of these issues are critically important as the underlying drivers of forced labor and other egregious human rights violations.
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As mentioned in the first question, the findings from the Seafood Social Risk Tool will not be incorporated into Seafood Watch’s assessments of the environmental impacts of fisheries and aquaculture. Our Social Sustainability Advisory Group strongly advised us against building social and human rights indicators into Seafood Watch’s environmental ratings because it is not the right tool for such a complicated exercise. While there are clear linkages between social and environmental issues, they need to be evaluated using distinct indicators. (NOTE: The updated version of the Seafood Slavery Risk Tool is called the Seafood Social Risk Tool.)
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Monterey Bay Aquarium is committed to continuing to work with our Social Sustainability Advisory Group to find ways to help businesses identify risks of labor abuses and engage with their seafood supply chains to address them. For example, we’ve updated the Seafood Social Risk Tool to use indicators to assess the risk of forced labor, human trafficking, and hazardous child labor in seafood supply chains. The indicators include factors that drive, or cause, forced labor, human trafficking, and hazardous child labor (such as discrimination against migrant workers) as well as factors correlated with the human rights abuses in question (such as illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing) and actual evidence of forced labor, human trafficking and hazardous child labor in fishing, aquaculture farming and seafood processing. This is different from the first version, the Seafood Slavery Risk Tool, which relied on country-level information to rate fisheries because direct evidence of forced labor, human trafficking, and hazardous child labor rarely exists for specific types of seafood production. The result of using country-level information was that many of the "high-risk" ratings were not able to capture differences in the level of risk between different fisheries within a country. We are also exploring ways to address the lack of traceability in seafood supply chains which makes it difficult for businesses to know if violations are occurring and conducting research to see how many seafood producing countries have refused to sign basic labor and human rights conventions and treaties.