Media reports that incorrectly report facts about overfishing, seafood sustainability and the state of the world’s oceans are the target of a recently-launched initiative.
The Collaborative for Food from Our Oceans Data (CFOOD) brings together a group of scientists and international experts in fisheries management to “gather data from around the world and maintain fisheries databases while ensuring seafood sustainability discussions in the media reflect ground-truth science,” according to a statement from the group.
SeafoodSource recently caught up with Ray Hilborn, professor in the school of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, the organizer of CFOOD.
Blank: Explain what the purpose of CFOOD is.
Hilborn: The CFOOD web site [along with Facebook and Twitter accounts] has two purposes: we are responding to reports in the media and addressing the classic myths. Next, we are just about to institute the “Classic Fish Stories” page, which will have a summary of the brief history of the fisheries that have been most important in setting policy agenda in the last 30 or 40 years. These will include Atlantic bluefin tuna, California sardines and northern cod. We want to have a place where people can go and get the big picture. Our broader group will produce papers, such as the impact of trawling on the animals and plants on the ocean bottom. Even in places that are heavily trawled, most of the bottoms are not trawled.
Blank: What is an example of misinformation about fisheries that CFOOD is countering?
Hilborn: A recent Newsweek article, “Our Taste for ‘Aquatic Bushmeat’ is Killing the Sea” uses interviews with Sylvia Earle and the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance to paint a bleak picture of the state of worldwide seafood. The article claims that 90 percent of fish in the ocean had been removed in the last half-century and 90 percent of the world’s stocks were unsustainably harvested – which was since corrected to 29 percent after CFOOD contacted the author. It’s a question of competing narratives: one is the gloom-and-doom narrative that most of the fish stocks are overexploited and most seafood is not sustainable, from people like Sylvia Earle, who say we should leave oceans alone and protect them. The other story is that fishery sustainability is very mixed. In many places, it is good and getting better. There is no simple story; it is very specific to region and species.
Blank: How do you plan to get the facts on fisheries and sustainability to the public and industry?
Hilborn: One of our hopes is that we develop a really big network. If we have more Twitter followers than Sylvia Earle, for example, and everyone who is really interested in sustainable seafood retweets the information, we would be reaching thousands of people. The big objective is to get a foothold in the consciousness of the media, the public and retailers. Retailers are making the big decisions these days of what to carry and not to. Retailers are avoiding a number of things, and we are hoping to get heard by them. While the pretense of seafood certification and eco-labeling is that it’s about the consumer, most consumers don’t make their buying decisions based on seafood labeling; they make their decisions based on price.
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