The Fisheye

Chile is taking a big step forward in the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing with the Chilean Senate’s approval of the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Service (SERNAPESCA) modernization project. These new regulations modernize SERNAPESCA, giving it more power to fight illegal fishing and punish the supply chain players who trade in—and profit from—illegally caught seafood.

We’ve been writing about our novel co-design process with the Chilean caletas (fishing coves) involved in the design and demonstration phase of the Fisheries Development Model in our previous blogs. We are proud to be collaborating with these fishing communities, and wanted to take the time to introduce them here.

The organizations working on seafood sustainability and traceability are many, and they’re mighty. Historically, though, there’s been little support for them to work together to solve problems and amplify their efforts. This siloing—common across the nonprofit and NGO spaces—means that it’s harder for us to share our learnings, spend time working together, and collaborate for impact.

Fortunately, the tide is turning: building on years of seafood traceability expertise, FishWise, Future of Fish, the Global Food Traceability Center, and World Wildlife Fund came together in early 2017 to work collectively to increase the adoption of traceability best practices.

My name is Emily Liang and I’m currently studying Aquaculture and Marine Resource Management as a Masters student at Wageningen University and Research (in Holland). I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California but am thankful to have my ethnic roots in Taiwan where some of the most delicious food in the world resides. While I’ve grown up only a 20 minute drive from the shores of the West Coast, my love and complete awe for the ocean didn’t begin until I was at UCLA for my undergraduate degree in Human Biology and Society. It was the spontaneous enrollment in an introductory course on Marine Biology, outside of my degree curriculum, that had me hooked on the wonders of the marine life.