Future of Fish announces the release of complementary industry reports, Global Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Seafood Industry and Direct-to-Consumer Strategies for Seafood, both available for free download on the organization’s website.
The economic, social, and environmental impacts of the pandemic on the seafood industry have been severe and diverse, including— disruptions to shipping and markets; high risk to fisher and seafood worker health and safety due to crowded conditions on board vessels and in processing facilities; increased food insecurity in coastal communities; and decreased fisheries science and enforcement and increased illegal fishing activities.
Across the diverse landscape that makes up the global seafood sector, fishers, communities, industry, and governments have developed an array of strategies, innovations, and coping mechanisms to ensure survival— of their families, communities, and businesses. Within this dynamic and rapidly evolving frontier, a new Future of Fish report, Global Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Seafood Industry, seeks to synthesize the complex conditions and outcomes to date and provide an overview of the current landscape of change.
One key response in the food industry, including seafood, was continued expansion into utilizing direct sales techniques. From initial coping responses consisting of dockside sales, seafood direct-to-consumer (D2C) business models continued to grow in sophistication and diversity throughout the pandemic. Today, D2C models have been launched by every node in the seafood supply chain and range from small companies servicing local markets to large e-commerce enterprises with national or even international reach. A second report, Direct-to-Consumer Strategies for Seafood, looks at the growth and application of this sales mechanism in more detail.
“We hope this body of work will help the seafood sector to better understand the impacts and adjust for challenges and embrace opportunities through the continuing pandemic,” said Dr. Marah Hardt, former Director of Discovery at Future of Fish and lead author of both reports. Full Reports and Executive Summaries of both the COVID and D2C Reports can be found on the Future of Fish resources section of our website.
Future of Fish is an international NGO on a mission to transform at-risk coastal communities into thriving centers of sustainability that can serve as replicable models for a just and sustainable blue economy.
