©Hannah Maule-Ffinch / MSC
Can eating fish ever be sustainable? This is the question popular culture magazine VICE.com debates in an in-depth feature on its global website. It explores the lengths to which fishers act to become sustainable and improve their practices and tackles head-on claims that the only way to have a sustainable ocean is to abandon eating fish entirely.
The piece, through its interviews with fishers, communities and officials, shows that sustainable management of the oceans is a complicated topic but one of global significance - not just to lovers of a tuna-melt, but to the lives and livelihoods of people and nations that are dependent on the ocean.
VICE were given an “access all areas” pass to the MSC certified Spanish Echebastar purse seine tuna fishery, operating in the tiny island idyll of the Seychelles.
In the feature, Echebastar CEO, Kepa Echevarría, explains how his ambition to meet the MSC Standard, particularly as head of a large-scale fishery, “seemed literally impossible” at the beginning.
Through conviction and eight years of trial and failure, Echebastar were finally independently certified to the MSC Fisheries Standard in 2019. They are now widely regarded as exemplars of good fisheries management for their use of science, technology, and ground-breaking approaches to sustainability.
Read about their story and how eating fish can be sustainable
