Sustainability Needs Accountability – Why It Is Time For The Equal Access Principles

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Seafood marketers, processors, and suppliers face ever-increasing pressure to provide sustainable seafood to their consumers. However, global fisheries management systems do not yet allow for a complete and honest assessment of the sustainability of large portions of the overall catch.

A key problem with the current fisheries management and governance system is that it is weighted in favor of industrial fishing companies to the exclusion of other stakeholders. Indeed, meetings of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) are often closed to observers from market players, conservation groups, and civil society organizations, and even to the media.

Is there any opportunity to open the system up?

Yes. It starts with the Equal Access Principles, an initiative to encourage more openness in public fisheries management globally by calling for the adoption of access rules that level the playing field. This would be in terms of being able to influence fisheries management decisions and understand or challenge the logic behind them.

The 12 Equal Access Principles include:

1. Open plenary and general meetings, including media.
2. Permit-approved observers at all subsidiary meetings.
3. Mandate the use of all RFMO official languages in subsidiary meetings.
4. Interpret all rules relating to stakeholder observers and participation to ensure open and inclusive participation.
5. Mandate parity of treatment between stakeholders–NGOs, markets, and producers and guarantee access to be heard by the delegations as well at national coordination, plenary, and subsidiary meetings.
6. Enact inclusive accreditation and participation rules to enable diverse stakeholder involvement, standardized across all RFMOs.
7. Implement clear and open guidelines for submitting written testimony and materials, free of any content review process.
8. Remove undue restrictions on the rights of observers to make oral statements during the deliberation process rather than afterward.
9. Recognize and include contributions made by stakeholder observers in any decision with potential impacts on the environment.
10. Promote partnership and joint activities with stakeholders with relevant expertise and/or local knowledge.
11. Make meeting locations and participation fees appropriate and reasonable for all participants.
12. Sustain stakeholders’ observer status even if one meeting is skipped.

This is not a radical, extremist agenda. This is a moderate, inclusive agenda that ideally everybody involved in the RFMO process should be able to sign up to.

It is also not just conservationists and activists who are saying this.

Along with Accountability.Fish, a wide range of stakeholders has backed the Principles, including ClientEarth, Environmental Defense Fund, Global Tuna Alliance, Greenpeace, Low Impact Fishers of Europe, Rema Foods Inc., The Pew Charitable Trusts, Ocean Outcomes, and more.

Throughout 2024, we are stepping up our outreach to players inside the seafood industry who are disadvantaged by the RFMO decision-making process.

If you want to be seen as selling a sustainable product and making a positive contribution to the various sustainability and climate challenges we face, trying to do that without a basic level of transparency is not something that is going to hold water. The Equal Access Principles effort is the best opportunity we have to deliver that transparency in the near future, and your support and partnership are needed now.

If you would like to endorse the Equal Access Principles, or you would like more information about the principles and the coalition supporting them, visit the Principles.Fish website.