Despite rising commitments from Japan and Thailand’s seafood companies, few firms have implemented the robust traceability systems required to manage escalating environmental and social risks, an investor assessment finds.
Asia’s largest seafood companies are pledging to trace the origins of their fish, but few have the digital systems, audits or concrete plans needed to curb illegal fishing, overfishing or human rights abuses in their supply chains, according to a new investor-focused review.
The second phase of the Seafood Traceability Engagement, led by food sector investor risk non-profit FAIRR, assessed seven global seafood majors with a market capitalisation of US$146 billion and found that four firms – Japanese players Maruha Nichiro and Mitsubishi, and Thai firms Thai Union and CP Foods – now have what investors consider robust group-level traceability commitments, an improvement on the previous study.
Corporate action is critical as Asia dominates global seafood production, processing and trade, yet the region is home to some of the most complex and opaque supply chains – and destructive practices. Asean countries experience over US$6 billion in annual economic losses from illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing, with Indonesia and Vietnam the hardest hit.
Corporate seafood commitments generally acknowledge the role traceability plays in addressing environmental and social risks – from IUU fishing and overfishing to habitat conversion and labour abuses – and in some cases reference alignment with the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST), a mechanism for improving sustainability through digital traceability. Two companies now explicitly cite GDST standards in their commitments, up from just one last year.
But despite stronger pledges, reporting on how these commitments will be implemented remains limited. No company provides a comprehensive, time-bound roadmap for rolling out full-chain digital traceability, finds the report, which was compiled in collaboration with conservation group WWF-US, United Nations Environment Finance Initiative, the World Benchmarking Alliance and Planet Tracker.
Digital traceability lags behind commitments
Across the industry, adoption of GDST-aligned digital systems is still low. Companies cite the same structural barriers: fragmented datasets, product mixing during handling, a largely paper-based documentation culture, and in Asia’s mature seafood industries, an ageing workforce that slows digital uptake.
Sustainable finance nonprofit Planet Tracker estimates that only 29 per cent of global seafood production can currently adopt full traceability systems under existing governance and sustainability conditions. Even where companies commit to traceability, the majority do not disclose how they will achieve interoperability with other data frameworks or ensure the quality and veracity of data.