Year reviews… either you love them or you hate them, but there’s no way around them come mid-December. Joanna Jones, marine lover and intern at the MSC, looks at the past twelve months and picks her top five MSC moments.
Olympic Gold for sustainability
The 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio showed a great commitment to seafood sustainability by only sourcing MSC and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) certified seafood. Athletes and media enjoyed over 350,000 portions of seafood in the Olympic Village. A special nod goes to cod, a favourite in Brazil, which came from Visir, an MSC certified family-run fishing business in Grindavik, Iceland.
The 2016 Games are a great example of how major events can support sustainable fisheries and of course ocean health through only sourcing certified sustainable seafood. Tokyo here we come!
Pall Hreinn Polsson, fisherman with Visir, Iceland
From zero to… 20,000
2016 saw the launch of the 20,000th product using MSC certified seafood, Las Cuarenta Paella. The Spanish-inspired dish contains a range of MSC certified seafood including pollock from Alaska and Russia, Danish blue shell mussels, and shrimps from Suriname. With seafood coming from a range of fisheries around the world Las Cuarenta showcases MSC certified fisheries worldwide. And can you believe that only a decade ago there were just about 1,000 products carrying the blue label to be found on our shelves?
Paella
Say no to seafood fraud
How sure can you be that the fish you eat is the fish you paid for? DNA testing by organisations like Oceana revealed that up to 43% of the salmon sold in the USA was mislabelled and that 30% of seafood served in restaurants in Brussels did not correspond to the species ordered. The solution: simply look for seafood carrying the blue label! MSC certified seafood gives you peace of mind by making sure that your seafood is really traced from ocean to plate.
Watch our #oceantoplate campaign>
Sustainable seafood from ocean to plate
Imagine a world without fish…
That’s exactly what John West Australia did in their Our Oceans Forever campaign, a collaborative project with the MSC and WWF. To demonstrate the problem of unsustainable fishing they created a new tuna brand and launched it across the nation. See for yourself how Australia and New Zealand liked a taste of a future without fish.
Watch John West Australia’s clip>
A world without fish
A fund for fishery science research and projects
2016 saw the launch of the Global Fisheries Sustainability Fund which was created to strengthen knowledge and capacity to assist small scale and developing world fisheries in their journey to achieving MSC certification. A total of £193,000 was awarded to six deserving recipients, with projects ranging from conducting risk assessments of tuna supply chains in Indonesia to the use of smartphones to capture octopus fishery data in Madagascar.
The second round of the fund is now open for applications and closes on 13 February 2017. A great start to an even more sustainable New Year!