Everything about Costco is bigger than normal. Costco is the largest wholesale club operator in North America. People shop at Costco because of its bulk goods, low prices, and the wide variety of merchandise available in their giant warehouses. But, while Costco continues to grow bigger and bigger, so does its footprint on the environment. Costco is destroying our oceans through its horrible seafood purchasing practices, leaving its customers in the dark by hiding the truth from them.
Fisheries
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Wholesale Ocean Destruction – Courtesy of CostCo
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010UN: Oceans’ Fish Could Disappear In The Next 40 Years
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.
“If the various estimates we have received… come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,” Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program’s green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.
A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones — ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.
The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.
UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was “drawing down to the very capital” on which it relies.
However, “our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy,” he said.
Collapse of fish stocks is not only an environmental matter.
One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, according to the UN.
The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million.
According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.
The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish — with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover.
Fishing fleet capacity is “50 to 60 percent” higher than it should be, Sukhdev said.
“What is scarce here is fish,” he said, calling for an increase in the stock of fish, not the stock of fishing capacity.”
Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says.
Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that — once fish stocks recover — would be able to land bigger catches.
“We believe solutions are on hand, but we believe political will and clear economics are required,” Sukhdev said.
Source: Agence France-Presse
Mark Bittman On Eating Sustainable Fish
Friday, April 9th, 2010
Casson Trenor, who works with Greenpeace on seafood issues, dropped by the Times the other day, and we sat and chatted for a while. My main question for him was, “What are people supposed to do?” Servers in restaurants and clerks in supermarkets are usually ignorant of what they’re serving and selling.
Even the most principled and informed consumer can’t possibly be certain of what he or she is getting. The strategy, as I said here, may just be to eat lower on the food chain, and eat less: in other words, mostly sardines and the like, and not many of those.
His response was simple, actually. “I myself can barely keep up with this stuff – it’s changing all the time, and it’s really complicated – and I look at the issue every day all day.” But Mr. Trenor, who has written a book called “Sustainable Sushi” and is the sustainability guru and a founder of Tataki, a sushi bar in San Francisco (more on this next month, when I visit), believes that ultimately the solution is not about consumer education. “That’s important, of course, and we need people to care about fish and the oceans. But if we really want to save them we need to get policy makers and companies that are invested in seafood to really change things.”
It’s one thing, he says, to tell people to eat smaller fish, wild salmon, and the like, “But what we really need to do is direct our purchasing dollars to institutions that are making strong, responsible decisions.”
According to Mr. Trenor, when Greenpeace started ranking seafood retailers they were all pathetic. “We were ranking them on a scale of one to ten, and the highest score – Whole Foods – was 3.9. But it’s changing. Real leaders are emerging. Whole Foods, Wegman’s, Ahold (which owns Stop and Shop, Giant, and others), Target – these companies are making good decisions.”
When companies develop specific policies, he explained, those policies allow them to move forward according to certain rules. “Like ‘we won’t buy anything with over a certain percentage of discard rate.’” (Discard rate, also called bycatch, refers to non-targeted fish that are killed during the harvest of the primary fish.) “Like ‘We’re going to work with EDF (the Environmental Defense Fund) to develop a shrimp standard.’”
Not that these moves approach perfection, he cautioned. But some companies are getting better, he said “and the fact that they’re taking the time to do this shows that there are really differences in the industry. We’re seeing a real split in the retail sector – these stores are really much safer to buy seafood than places like Publix, Price Chopper, or Costco.”
Mr. Trenor originally included Trader Joe’s in this list, but a couple of weeks ago the chain announced a plan to sell only sustainable seafood by 2012, and claims to be instituting changes that will move it towards that immediately.
To Mr. Trenor’s way of thinking, it’s great if a consumer knows how to make choices among the five major species of tuna, but “It’s not as important as Wegman’s knowing the difference. If we ally with the retailers that are really working on this, and leave the others behind, we’re voting with our dollars.”
People want to eat fish, and the chain of getting them from ocean to store is long and opaque; there is fraud at every level. But – according to Mr. Trenor – a sustainable policy has transparency and traceability.
What’s clear is that the days of trusting your local fishmonger (if you have one) are largely gone. Oddly, Greenpeace now feels the thing to do is trust your non-local fish-buying corporation, as long as that corporation makes rules and sticks to them.
Surely, I asked, this alone wasn’t going to do the trick. When it comes to marine protection, the United States is among the most progressive countries in the world. We are the leader not only in sustainable seafood programs but in establishing marine reserves, essentially national parks of the sea. Our stores can achieve perfection and our consumers behave in a completely principled manner, and none of this has an effect on what happens in Spain or Norway or Japan.
He agreed that international cooperation and advocacy are needed. “Less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s ocean is protected – you can fish pretty much anywhere you want. We need to set aside a huge amount of the ocean where fish can spawn and live. And if we leave the breeders alone they’ll spill over into other areas where fish that can be caught are abundant.”
This is beginning also. A small reserve will open (or close, really, since fishing and vessel discharge will both be prohibited) next month in the South Orkney Islands, near Antarctica. (This may sound like an inhospitable environment, but it’s an important spawning and feeding ground.) Others are being discussed. And GPS tracking and other technologies make enforcement possible.
With both international and corporate cooperation it may not yet be too late to turn things around. And if a Greenpeace representative is optimistic, maybe there’s room for real hope.
Source: NY Times
Trader Joe’s Agrees To ‘Green-Up Their Stores’
Monday, March 29th, 2010
The future of our oceans became a little bit brighter as Trader Joe’s agreed to “green-up their stores” by implementing sustainable seafood policies. For months, Greenpeace publicly campaigned to pressure Trader Joe’s to adopt sustainable seafood purchasing policies throughout all of their stores.
Greenpeace applauds the supermarket chain for finally seeing the light and working towards sustainable seafood policies that will help save the oceans and put an end to destructive fishing practices.
Trader Joe’s felt the heat from Greenpeace’s mock website (www.traitorjoe.com), relentless phone calls from supporters, thoughtful karaoke songs from shoppers and in-store demonstrations and questions to store managers from activists across the country.
After months hearing from activists, shoppers and pirate pals how important it is that I stop destroying the oceans just to turn a profit I finally turned over a new barnacle. I’ve publicly announced that I am going to:
- Offer only sustainable seafood in stores by December 31, 2012.
- Work with a third-party, science-based organizations to establish definitions and parameters for addressing customer concerns about overfishing, destructive catch or production methods, and the importance of marine reserves.
- Remove “red-listed” seafood from our shelves. We stopped selling Chilean Sea Bass in 2005, Orange Roughy in July of 2009, and Red Snapper in March of 2010.
- Provide accurate information on all seafood labels, including species’ Latin names, origin and catch or production method.
- Use my buying power to leverage change in the seafood industry.
