Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability (SALT)

The Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability (SALT) is a global alliance for knowledge exchange and action to promote legal and sustainable fisheries through improved transparency in seafood supply chains. SALT brings together the seafood industry, governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to accelerate learning and to support collaboration on innovative solutions for legal and sustainable seafood, with a particular focus on traceability, the ability to track the movement of seafood through supply chains.

SALT is a public-private partnership between USAID and the Walton Family, Packard and Moore Foundations and is implemented by FishWise, a non-profit sustainable seafood consultancy.

Approach

SALT's objectives are to:

1. Expand accessible, interoperable and electronic catch documentation and traceability for wild capture fisheries and aquaculture.
2. Increase the capacity of seafood-producing countries to adopt catch documentation and traceability systems to strengthen fishery management and verify fisheries data.
3. Increase incentives and capacities for the seafood industry to adopt electronic traceability to ensure the legality of wild-caught fisheries products in their supply chains.
4. Identify ways in which the implementation of electronic catch documentation and traceability can support human and labor rights for all seafood workers, food security, livelihoods and well-being.

SALT aims to catalyze solutions that transform how the seafood industry and governments collect, share, verify and, ultimately, use data for sustainable and socially responsible fisheries. SALT’s activities will include collaboration and learning events (in-person and virtual) that convene diverse stakeholders across seafood supply chains and an online resource and learning platform to support knowledge sharing and expertise from other projects from around the world.   Addressing illegal fishing, associated labor rights abuses and inadequate fisheries management will contribute to improving security, economic prosperity and food security for the millions of people that depend on fisheries for their livelihoods.

Why Join SALT?

Over the last several years, many stakeholders have indicated a strong willingness to work together on seafood traceability, particularly those aspects that no group can solve alone. SALT will enable a wide array of stakeholders to clarify the needs, challenges and opportunities for improving seafood traceability and work together on those issues best addressed through collaboration and collective action. Through this process the:

• Seafood industry can offer their experience and learn more about the value of traceability for improving supply chains, complying with import requirements, reducing business risk and contributing to sustainable fisheries.
• Seafood-producing country governments can share information about their fisheries and learn about traceability techniques and practices that can be used to improve fisheries management, verify the legality of harvests and build capacity to manage fisheries sustainably.
• Seafood-consuming country governments can share information about their seafood import regulations, facilitating enhanced compliance and more verifiable supply chains.
• NGOs can share experience from pilot efforts in traceability and gain access to new stakeholders and collaborators, strengthen networks and enhance their abilities to achieve goals associated with environmental and social responsibility in seafood.

All stakeholders will have opportunities to learn lessons from traceability and electronic data collection pilot projects and act on those findings.

Next Steps and the Future

In its first year, SALT will convene stakeholders across seafood supply chains to define problems related to seafood traceability and identify innovative solutions to move forward. This “co-design” process is supported by CollaborateUp, a collaboration consulting firm, and an advisory committee consisting of leaders from government, philanthropy, industry and civil society. The co-design findings will inform the official launch of SALT in late 2018 and the plan for the remaining four years of the project.

For more information and to register your interest or participate in SALT, visit www.fishwise.org/salt or contact SALT@fishwise.org.