The Spanish tuna fleet has shared its ‘Responsibly Fished Tuna’ sustainable fishing standard.
Known as ‘APR’ in Spanish, the standard is the only such scheme in the world that addresses both social and environmental sustainability and has attracted the attention of more than 40 North American NGOs from the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions who are keen to develop their own standard addressing the social side of fishing.
The Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions, which has entrusted its project’s development to the American environmental organisation Conservation International (CI), has compared the APR standard against its own, with CI representatives boarding the OPAGAC ship El Charo, flying the Ecuadoran flag, to evaluate how the Spanish standard is applied in the field.
Julio Morón, managing director of OPAGAC, said, “In the world fishing environment, our fleet has been the first to champion the social side of sustainability. This dual approach is spreading quite quickly all over the world as the formula for dealing with problems like modern slavery in fishing and poor working conditions in many fleets.”
The conclusions reached after this field work were shared at a meeting organised by the Seafood Ethics Common Language Group, a working group of the British public body Seafish. Early findings suggest that the Spanish standard complies with the American standard’s requirements and will help show fishery improvement projects how to prioritise social sustainability
