With the increasing proportion of the seafood being farmed in captivity worldwide, the United Nations is working to create a new international standard to certify the safety and harvesting of fish.
Currently, almost half of all seafood eaten is farmed in captivity by humans instead of being raised in the wild, prompting questions about whether what is eaten is safe and whether it was produced without hurting the environment, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.
“The idea is to bring together a broad group of people involved in the industry, look at what’s already being done in terms of certification, and come up with an overarching framework that can help put aquaculture certification schemes on the same page,” Rohana Subasinghe of FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Department said.
A certification system, that is uniform across the world, could verify that seafood has been harvested in a way that is healthy, socially responsible and environmentally- conscious, and to this end, FAO is mounting the effort to create a standardised framework. He said.
Without one global standard, both consumers and producers are tasked with deciding which certification method to trust. As the number of standards increase, consumers could become confused and lose confidence in the certification system.
“This will help ensure that standards, wherever they are being applied, are credible, trustworthy, and fair and will give producers clear goals to shoot for,” he added.