The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, a Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.-based nonprofit aiming to expand the world’s access to responsibly sourced seafood, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based traceability software firm Seafood Souq.
The MoU serves as a commitment in which the two firms have promised to work together to help seafood supply chain actors better identify harvest sources and understand sustainability risks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which SFP is formally entering for the first time.
In so doing, both SFP and Seafood Souq aim to bolster companies’ traceability infrastructures and lessen the region’s dependence on imports to meet seafood demand – an issue that has been greatly exacerbated by supply chain troubles brought on by the recent war in Iran, according to SFP Partnerships Engagement Specialist David Parreño Duque.
“We at SFP have been thinking about the Middle East region for a while now,” Parreño Duque told SeafoodSource at the 2026 Seafood Expo Global, which took place in Barcelona, Spain, from 21 to 23 April. “I thought Seafood Souq was a good match for us. This will make businesses become more resilient in general and help them navigate this crisis a bit better. Companies that have sustainability as a central strategy and not just as a cherry on top of the cake are more prepared as crises arise.”
Seafood Souq’s suite of technology offerings includes a Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST)-aligned system that digitizes each step along the journey for a seafood product, capturing critical tracking events and other key data elements to help businesses comply with global standards. The partnership aims to implement SFP’s Seafood Metrics tool, which is a data-driven system that helps seafood companies better understand the level of sustainability risk present in their supply chains, into Seafood Souq’s technology suite.