Background

 

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), aquaculture is often the cause of habitat degradation (mangrove conversion), impacts on species biodiversity (escapes, disease transfer), unsustainable use of natural resources (water, wild fish), climate impacts (energy use), and violation of workers’ rights.

 

The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) is the world’s leading certification program for responsibly farmed seafood, significantly improving both environmental and social standards of seafood farming.

 

In Vietnam, where we source vannamei and black tiger shrimp, less than 15% of farmed shrimp is ASC certified. One reason is that ASC certification is costly and requires know-how, making it out of reach for many small-scale farmers.

The project

In Northcoast and the Kangamiut Group, we believe that we can make a difference by helping push things in the right direction, one step at a time. Therefore, we were delighted to enter the collaboration with ASC and WWF as well as our partners across our Vietnam farmed shrimp supply chain with the goals of

 

  • Empowering small-scale shrimp farmers to improve their environmental and social performance and meet ASC certification standards
  • Developing a business case that incentivizes improvement work by introducing cost-sharing mechanisms in supply chain for certification

 

The project resulted in ASC certification of 27 small-scale farms in Vietnam supplying a total of 300 MT vannamei annually.

Outlook

 

In our opinion, more partnerships across the public, private, and NGO sectors are needed if we want to succeed in improving environmental and social standards in aquaculture.

 

With farmed seafood constituting a continuously increasing proportion of globally consumed seafood, such initiatives are more important than ever if we want to support a sustainable Blue Transformation and secure a healthy and nutritious food source for a growing population.