Celebrating Two Decades of Transforming Global Fisheries and Aquaculture Sustainability
SFP was founded in 2006 on the belief that the seafood industry – from fishers to global retailers – could be a powerful force for improving fisheries and aquaculture.
After all, the industry depends directly on robust and healthy fisheries, and the ecosystems they are based in, for their livelihoods, their supply, and their financial viability. Rather than doing the work for industry, we work in true collaborative partnerships with the seafood supply chain, using their business interests and their leverage to advocate for and support improvements.
Two decades later, SFP’s approach – industry-led, science-based, solutions-forward, transparent, collaborative – has transformed the landscape of fisheries and aquaculture improvement. And we have had a profound impact on the oceans, the seafood industry, fishing communities, and fisheries management around the world.
As we celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are looking back at some of SFP’s most significant impacts – and forward at what it will take to reach our ultimate goal of a world where all seafood is responsibly produced and sourced.
It’s no accident that partnership is in the name of our organization.
Jim Cannon, founder and CEO of SFP
Since SFP was founded, seafood production and sourcing practices have changed, competitors are collaborating, and there’s been real improvements to fisheries and aquaculture. And now we’re looking ahead to even tougher challenges.
Twenty years ago, SFP introduced a new and unique approach to fisheries management – one that engages the entire seafood supply chain to lead improvement efforts and help rebuild depleted fish stocks.
Over the course of the last two decades, SFP has been focused on a singular goal: improving fisheries and aquaculture around the world. But how we approach that goal has shifted slightly as we’ve grown and the seafood industry has grown with us.
SFP was founded and pioneered the use of fishery improvement projects (FIPs), multistakeholder efforts that bring together retailers, processors, producers, and fishers to identify and address environmental challenges in marine fisheries. By creating and helping to lead a demonstration portfolio of FIPs, SFP demonstrated that collaboration – among industry, governments, NGOs, and scientists – is the most effective way to improve fisheries.
Once we proved that FIPs were an effective approach to fisheries improvement, SFP began to get out of the business of running FIPs, transferring ownership and responsibility to the seafood industry. And we began to focus on other mechanisms to amplify industry leadership on fisheries improvement.
With growing industry participation and leadership in fisheries and aquaculture improvement, SFP turned its focus on creating common goals for industry to collectively work toward. We launched the Target 75 initiative, creating a global target of achieving at least 75% of volume within 13 major seafood sectors to be certified or improving. We also formalized a set of Supply Chain Roundtables, bringing companies together to work pre-competitively across sectors of common interest.
By this point, the sustainable fisheries (and thus seafood) movement is well underway. FIPs are a commonly used tool and certification is a recognized measure of sustainability. Yet there are still areas where industry leadership and scaling of solutions are not sufficient to address the tough challenges in fisheries and aquaculture. To meet these challenges, SFP launched several new lines of work, focused on reducing marine bycatch, supporting small-scale fishing communities, combating illegal fishing, and promoting landscape-level aquaculture management.
In our first 20 years, SFP has been a part of tremendous successes in many of the world’s most important fisheries and aquaculture regions. But many problems still remain. Looking to the future, we are launching an updated strategy, focused on impact, collaborative fisheries management, and industry accountability. We are calling this strategy “All Hands on Deck,” because we know we can’t do it alone. So we’re building a coalition of like-minded industry leaders, NGOs, governments, funders, and other stakeholders to join us as collaborators and partners for the next 20 years.
A sampling of the many ways SFP has had an impact over the last two decades –
on the water, in fishing communities, in ecosystems, and on fisheries management.
In everything we do, we prioritize building industry leadership to take sustainability to scale
We give industry the tools and resources to power their sustainability commitments, underpinned by the science and data that are the foundation of all our work.
We empower the supply chain to be an active partner in fisheries governance, an approach that is good for business, good for communities, and good for nature.
We connect companies that want to take action to protect biodiversity and nature and organizations that are doing good work on the ground and in the water.
SFP began two decades ago with just two donors – the Packard Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Today, these two founding donors remain some of our most important supporters. Along the way, we’ve quadrupled in size and received support from dozens of other foundations, government agencies, development banks, and individuals.
