Research project
Sustaining Ethical Aquatic Trade (SEAT)
Creating a framework to assess the sustainability of fish farms which will set sustainability standards and give consumers information about the the sustainability and safety of their seafood.
- Duration
- 2009 - 2013
- Contact
- Jeroen Guinee
- Funding
-
European Commission - The Seventh Framework Programme (EU FP7)
- Partners
Partners
- University of Stirling, UK
- CEFAS Weymouth Laboratory, UK
- University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Wageningen University, Netherlands
- Leiden University, Netherlands
- Shanghai Ocean University, China
- Can Tho University, Vietnam
- Kasetsart University, Thailand
- Bangladesh Agricultural University, Bangladesh
- World Wildlife Fund, Denmark
- World Fish Center, Malaysia
- Food and Agriculture Organisation, Italy
- University of Bergen, Norway
- Danish Institute for International Studies, Denmark
Aquaculture has, over the last decades, grown faster than any other animal production sector. Today, aquaculture supplies half of the world’s finfish. Simultaneously the growth of the import of Asian aquatic products into the EU has increased steadily. Current EU policy supporting international trade between Asia and Europe concentrates on issues of food safety as measures of quality, whilst market-forces drive development of standards and labels that identify social and environmental parameters.
The SEAT (Sustaining Ethical Aquatic Trade) project proposed to establish an evidence-based framework to support current and future stakeholder dialogues organised by third party certifiers. Among other things, the evidence-based framework has been based on detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies of four farmed aquatic products, Tilapia (Oreochromis spp.), Shrimp (Penaeid spp.), Catfish (Pangasius spp.) and Freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium spp.) in China, Thailand, Vietnam and Bangladesh, all major producing countries.
From 2010 to 2014, CML has performed these LCA studies as part of SEAT’s work package 3. In 2014, the SEAT project and the work on these LCA studies has been finalized.
More information
All public SEAT-LCA deliverable reports can be downloaded from the project’s website: http://seatglobal.eu/
and from the CML website