The seafood industry has long grappled with the challenge of realizing full transparency and accountability within its supply chains. Traceability and the data and information flow enabled by it are now recognized as essential for sustainable fisheries management, combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, protecting marine ecosystems, ensuring seafood safety and as critical for industry actors to comply with international regulations and their own Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitments.
Standardized data – the ability to capture and share data in consistent formats – is key to ensuring comprehensive traceability and realizing the positive impacts that consistent data flow allows. Standardized data ensures consistency and verifiability of seafood products across the supply chain. It enhances fisheries management through Catch Documentation Schemes (CDS), levels the playing field for small-scale fisheries and overcomes technological trade barriers by enabling interoperability. Moreover, standardized data facilitates an efficient data flow between supply chain actors, allowing companies to seamlessly pull accurate information from across the chain.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, as a global authority with vast expertise and influence, seeks to advance sustainability across the fishing and aquaculture industries, recognizing traceability and standardized data as critical for responsible ocean management. This piece maps out the evolution of traceability through the lens of the FAO, highlighting their influence over the past decade and underscoring the growing significance of the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) in driving industry-wide alignment toward a fully traceable seafood industry.
Identifying the core components of a comprehensive traceability system
Key Data Elements (KDEs)
In the early 2010s, the FAO recognized the need for standardized data in seafood supply chains to address increasing concerns around IUU fishing and to improve fisheries management. The 2013 UN Fisheries Resolution marked a significant milestone, as it laid the groundwork for developing guidance on key data elements (KDEs) and critical tracking events (CTEs). These concepts were introduced as essential components of an effective traceability system.
Key data elements, or KDEs, sketch out what we need to know about our seafood products; considering catch locations, catch date and time and harvest methods. KDE’s are continually updated to reflect evolving best practices in the industry. The FAO’s early efforts focused on identifying these KDEs and encouraging the industry to adopt standardized approaches to data collection and sharing.
Critical Tracking Events (CTEs)
Alongside KDEs, the FAO emphasized the importance of capturing data at specific points in the supply chain, known as Critical Tracking Events (CTEs). Events like landing, packaging, shipping and sale, when a manufacturer is responsible for logging associated data. CTEs facilitate what we need to know about our seafood, in short, these are the “where and the who collects my what.” By recording data at these critical points, CTEs ensure that traceability information is accurate and timely, providing a clear picture of the product’s journey from catch to consumer.
The integration of KDEs and CTEs into traceability systems enables a more comprehensive understanding of the seafood supply chain. It allows for the identification of any discrepancies or gaps in data, which can be crucial in detecting and preventing IUU fishing activities.
Catch Documentation Schemes (CDS)
To further strengthen traceability efforts, the FAO has been a strong advocate for Catch Documentation Schemes (CDS). CDS are regulatory frameworks that require documentation to accompany seafood products. In effect, they are invisible threads attached to each seafood product that if followed, take you along the supply chain back to the point it was harvested.
CDS integrate KDEs and CTEs into their framework. This integration is vital for ensuring that the data collected is not only accurate but also meaningful in the context of fisheries management and science. By providing detailed information about the origin and movement of seafood, CDS support efforts to combat IUU fishing and promote sustainable fishing practices.
The FAO has produced a series of species-specific as well as country-level guidance on designing CDS. Examples include their 2016 paper on Design options for the development of tuna catch documentation schemes, laying out the critical factors that should be considered when designing CDS for managing and monitoring tuna fisheries, or their Voluntary Guidelines for Catch Documentation Schemes produced in 2017 which presents guidelines for these schemes with a focus on making them lawful, trade-friendly, and effective, while also being simple and transparent, with considerations around costs and integration into existing systems.
CDS play a crucial role in enhancing market access, particularly for small-scale fisheries and aquaculture operations. Many of these smaller players have historically been excluded from global markets because they were unable to provide the necessary data to demonstrate the legality and sustainability of their products due to limitations to operational infrastructure. CDS simplifies the process by offering clear guidelines and support for data collection, helping to create a level playing field.
Interoperability in the Supply Chain
One of the most significant challenges in establishing a fully traceable seafood supply chain is ensuring that digital information can move freely and securely between different actors and governments. This concept, known as interoperability, is crucial for creating a seamless flow of data across the entire supply chain. Without interoperability, data silos can form, leading to inefficiencies, errors, and a lack of transparency.
The FAO has long recognized the importance of interoperability, identifying in their 2016 Seafood traceability systems: Gap analysis of inconsistencies in Standards and Norms the need for a global architecture for interoperable systems. Achieving interoperability requires the adoption of common data formats, protocols, and systems that allow different stakeholders—such as fishers, processors, regulators, and retailers—to communicate effectively.
Interoperability is also essential for governments to meet their international commitments, such as those outlined in the Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA), which seeks to prevent IUU-caught fish from entering the market. By ensuring that data can be easily shared and verified across borders, interoperability supports the enforcement of these international agreements and contributes to the overall goal of sustainable fisheries management.
How the GDST brings the traceability components together
While the FAO’s guidance in the previous decade identified the essential building blocks of a comprehensive traceability system, the persisting challenge underlying standardization and interoperability has been the issue of coordination and alignment, ensuring that all global industry actors are working with the same data elements and interoperable formats and systems.
The Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) emerged as an industry-led tool to facilitate this alignment.
The GDST Standard, collated by a series of industry-driven, participatory Dialogues, is designed to address the challenges of data standardization and interoperability by providing a common framework that all actors can adopt. The Standard outlines specific requirements for KDEs and CTEs, ensuring that data is collected and shared consistently. By adopting the GDST Standard, seafood companies and governments can improve the traceability of their products, enhance their ability to comply with international regulations, and ultimately contribute to the sustainability of global fisheries.
One of the key benefits of the GDST Standard is its flexibility. It is designed to be adaptable to different contexts and can be implemented by companies of all sizes, from small-scale fishers to large multinational corporations. This inclusivity is crucial for achieving widespread adoption and ensuring that the benefits of traceability are felt across the entire industry.
As well as working alongside an array of tech and software Partners to accelerate chain-wide shifts towards adopting interoperable systems, the Standard details the technical formats and nomenclatures required for sharing data among interoperable traceability systems.
How much of an impact has the GDST Standard had on the FAO’s approach to its traceability guidance?
As FAO guidance has developed over the last decade, there is increasing recognition of the GDST’s Standard as the principal framework for achieving comprehensive traceability across global supply chains. In their 2023 guidance on advancing end-to-end traceability, the document highlighted the KDEs and CTEs contained within the GDST Standard, framing them as the benchmark for achieving the standardized collection and transfer of data. Similarly, the FAO’s Understanding and implementation of catch documentation schemes paper from 2022 underscores the importance of aligning national monitoring, control, and surveillance tools with the GDST Standard to enhance the effectiveness of CDS. This culminated in the 2024 State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report in which the FAO uses KDE’s set out in the GDST Standard as an example of the key data pieces and events that should be identified at the point of harvest in the supply chain to combat IUU fishing.
Governmental Adoption and International Commitments
Governments play a critical role in the success of traceability initiatives, as they are responsible for enforcing regulations and ensuring compliance with international commitments. The adoption of the GDST Standard by governments can significantly enhance their ability to meet these commitments, particularly in relation to the PSMA, Flag State responsibilities, and the International Plan of Action to Prevent, Deter, and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing (IPOA-IUU).
For example, the PSMA requires countries to implement measures to prevent illegally caught fish from entering their ports. By adopting the GDST Standard, governments can ensure that the data needed to verify the legality of catches is readily available and can be easily shared with other countries. This not only supports the enforcement of the PSMA but also helps to create a more transparent and accountable global seafood industry. The Global Information Exchange System (GIES), used by PSMA states, exemplifies this need for seamless digital interoperability, allowing countries to communicate effectively and share key data in real-time.
Governments play critical, and often multiple roles in the seafood industry, as port states, flag states and market states. While the GDST does not expect all government systems to be fully GDST-capable, there must be a pathway for seafood industry-compliant data to be ingested and utilized by governmental systems. Ensuring that their systems are interoperable with GDST standards will help governments maximize the effectiveness of industry data and improve regulatory oversight.
Case studies from countries that have successfully implemented the GDST Standard demonstrate its effectiveness in improving traceability and compliance with international regulations. For instance, some nations have integrated elements of the GDST Standard with the UN FLUX system, a global framework for exchanging fisheries data, and the Global Record of Fishing Vessels, which provides a comprehensive database of vessels involved in fishing and fishing-related activities. These integrations highlight the potential of the GDST Standard to enhance the effectiveness of existing international frameworks and support the achievement of global sustainability goals.
The influence of the FAO, utilizing its global reach in outlining the architecture of comprehensive traceability and transparency across global seafood supply chains has been clear over the last decade. But in recent years, the prevalence of the GDST and its Standard in the FAO’s outputs as a single anchor point for businesses and governments to align to in ensuring standardized data collection and exchange right across the supply chain is highly significant. It signals a clear direction of travel for governments across the globe to follow in the development of policies – that being GDST-ready, and able to ingest seafood industry GDST-compatible digital data allows nations to future-proof as industry continues to align to its Standard.