Hidden secrets of the global seafood trade revealed Growing human populations are placing enormous pressure on the ocean’s remaining resources. Clear seafood traceability can help by improving understanding of the intricacies of the global seafood trade, resulting in more transparent, traceable and sustainable seafood markets. Food and Natural Resources © D.Cawthorn About one-fifth of the world fishery catches are from illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing that threatens marine ecosystems and the recovery of overexploited fish stocks. These activities also short-change the economy, jeopardise livelihoods and are frequently linked to criminal networks. As seafood trade routes become longer and more complex, there is an ever-increasing need to trace seafood from source to consumption. This will help identify where IUU fishing occurs, and how and where illegal products enter the market. With the aid of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships grant under the EU-funded Horizon 2020 SNAPTRACE (Fishing in the dark: unravelling the global trade and traceability of the ‘snappers’) project, researchers addressed the challenge of IUU fishing using snappers (Lutjanidae family) as a model. This fish is one of the world’s most highly prized yet misunderstood group of fishes. Impact of mislabelling Scientists applied a multidisciplinary approach to investigate what drives global snapper supply and demand. They employed state-of-the-art molecular techniques to harness the power of DNA barcoding and evaluate the species sold as snapper on world markets. “There are 112 species of Lutjanids and many countries allow any of them to be labelled as snapper,” says lead researcher Dr Donna Cawthorn “and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.” In fact, by DNA barcoding 300 samples collected from 6 countries, SNAPTRACE showed that lax application of the umbrella term ‘snapper’ and widespread mislabelling hid the identities of at least 67 species from 16 families in marketplaces around the world. This effectively grouped together taxa for sale that derive from an array of disparately managed fisheries with markedly different conservation concerns. “Bringing this trade into the open will force international labelling and traceability policies, as well as enforcement measures, to be updated,” explains project coordinator Prof. Stefano Mariani. The project also collated and compared production, import and export data from international and national statistical collections for the years between 2006 and 2013. Results indicated that official trade data severely lack the level of detail needed to track snapper trade flows, uncover potential IUU activities and inform the fisheries management of snappers and related species. “The lack of taxonomic detail and use of vague generic names in trade records are among the most insidious obstacles to seafood traceability. Therefore, widely used harmonised commodity classification systems should be developed to fill these gaps,” states Prof. Mariani. Importance of standardised terms SNAPTRACE discovered that globally-used harmonised trade codes are not precise enough to record the true biodiversity exploited by fisheries. According to Dr Cawthorn: “This leads to vague denominations, which are further complicated by the global nature of the seafood supply chain. This makes trade permeable to illegal fishing products, hinders collection of reliable data and perpetuates the lack of transparency for consumers.” Although researchers focused specifically on ‘snappers’, the same issues affect many other species that are also marketed under other umbrella terms, such as ‘groupers’, ‘croakers’, ‘sea bass’, ‘sea bream’ and so on. SNAPTRACE researchers are currently investigating some of these with new analyses. “If we consider the complexity of the myriad of international languages across the world, without robust standardised and harmonised trade denominations, the situation will always be intractable,” Dr Cawthorn concludes. Keywords SNAPTRACE], snapper, seafood, fishing, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU), mislabelling
