In 2006, Jim Cannon founded the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), a nonprofit that helps rebuild depleted fish stocks and reduce the environmental and social impacts of fishing and fish farming. Four years later, Chris Ninnes founded the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), an NGO that certifies sustainable seafood farms. The two have worked together many times around the world, including a recent collaboration building a model for landscape-level improvements in aquaculture in Andhra Pradesh, India.
Their methods are different but they want the same thing: to help individual farmers or fisheries and collectives make the changes for sustainability without having to carry the burden all on their own.
“We’ve had a long-term relationship with ASC, and I think there’s a couple of reasons why it works,” Cannon said in a session at Seafood Expo Global in Barcelona last week. “We share a very strong view that the producers need to benefit. That’s the leap. There has to be a financial benefit, specifically a financial benefit. If a farmer is producing more nature, they have to get paid somehow in the system.”
This can come from improving margins. It can come from industry and from regulation. It can come from external support of biodiversity organizations. It can’t rely on consumer demand for more sustainable products.
“The demand can create a question,” Cannon said. “It can create interest, it can create a convening power, but ultimately if the solution isn’t something fishermen want to do, or farmers want to do because they’re going to make more money out of it, they’re not going to do it.”
Farmers and fishers can’t do it alone
Every ecosystem, Cannon said, starts in a period of pure nature. As human production expands, there’s a drawdown of that nature. But eventually, as is happening in a lot of countries around the world, there’s a regeneration and rewilding and a restoration phase. Andhra Pradesh it is on that rebuilding phase.
But while individual farmers—such as shrimp farmers—can make a difference on their farms, their role in the ecosystem is relatively small. And the improvements can be expensive. Both Cannon and Ninnes pointed out that there are huge regeneration projects that must be tackled to protect endangered species, rebuild wildlife habitats, protect watersheds. These involve shared water bodies, shared roads, shared access. Who pays for that?
The biggest incentive to help support restoration of key habitat areas belongs to the global buyers whose business is 30%-to-50% of the production from that ecosystem, Cannon said. They have the resources and stand to significantly if the ecosystem is degraded.
ASC hasn’t focused on the big picture in the past, but has provided certifications at the farm level while SFP works on the regional scale, with public data like the policy framework for agriculture, how is enforcement working, what voluntary practices are groups of farmers taking. But Ninnes said that’s having to change.
In the last 12 years, ASC has experienced double-digit growth in size and influence, Ninnes said. It’s a success story. “But at the same time, I look at our coverage of global agriculture, and it’s 3%. And when you look at the vision of the ASC, then we have an aspiration to be influential at a sector level. And we can’t do that by just focusing on farm-by-farm certification.
“I think it will always be part of what ASC does. It’s a fundamental and foundational piece of the work that we do. But we have to find ways of bringing assurances into larger-scale landscape-type models, jurisdictional-type models, watershed-type models…you really need collective action beyond just the farm to have influence on the importance of effluent, if you like, in terms of the watershed. Ideally, he said, that support needs to be locally based.”
Andhra Pradesh, Ninnes said, is particularly focused on the export market. But the demand for sustainability only accounts for between 20%-25% of the market, meaning 75% has no market incentive for improvement. So if you want farmers to value sustainability, you have to make it add to their bottom line. Two ways of doing that, he said, are by reducing input costs and improving the survival of the animals they farm. Their hope is to provide assurances going forward that such actions are meaningful at scale.
Connecting the dots at Andrha Pradesh
The role of both ASC and SFP is to connect the dots between organizations that are already operating in the area.
“So if you’re a shrimp farmer or a shrimp buyer or a retailer, you don’t know squat about Indian NGOs and nature restoration groups,” Cannon said. “So how do you make a choice? You’ve got to do due diligence, you’ve got to do your homework. Well, we know them. We’ve got contacts there. We work with them. We know these people through our networks.”
It’s not easy, he said. Everyone from the farmers to the local politicians to the NGOs and the government are a little suspicious, a little competitive. Everyone’s “a little bit on edge. So there’s a lot we can do to say, well, we’ve worked with this person for 20 years. They’re really good. Hear them out. And that’s often all it’s needed.”
Cannon said that, ultimately, some blended finance model would be helpful to seed some of the improvements that could be made and become absorbed into day-to-day practice at Andhra Pradesh.
In the area they’re talking about, there’s a natural delta that’s now been modified with flood control and drainage ditches, Cannon said. The old river channels are still there and they’re not being farmed. The area is already planning a large-scale mangrove restoration work in areas that are degraded land with little value for agriculture but that could generate enormous benefits in terms of carbon sequestration, local fish habitat for nursery grounds, things like that.
“I want to be very careful to specify we’re looking at community-led efforts by the folks who live on those lands, the fishing communities,” Cannon said. “It’s not something that’s being imposed on them. It’s not some outside firm coming in and saying, I’ll put carbon money on it. No, this is stuff they want to do, and they’re trying to raise the capital. How can we help?“
