Communicating Sustainability

This week the Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative launched a program to help diners and shoppers make the right choice when choosing fish. The move comes as part of an effort to promote the preservation of fish resources, of which 76 percent are overexploited or fished at maximum levels.

The scheme, known as FishMS, is supported by the South African government and the WWF. It enables people to send the name of the fish to a number and get an immediate colour-coded response; green means the fish comes from a species with healthy population numbers, orange indicates a species which can be legally sold but is endangered, and red denotes fish that are illegal to buy and sell in South Africa.

The service “provides consumers and anyone else working with fish with a handy and extremely cool tool to help choose fish from healthy populations and relieve the pressure on overexploited species,” said Jaco Barendse, the project’s coordinator. “If we don’t care now we may not have the choice we take for granted. There is no ignoring this. We can’t assume that there is an endless supply of fish in the sea.”

Source: Associated Press