Responsibilities come with great challenges

A vision that we all share is that of a food and feed industry which is able to assess its impacts and act responsibly in the face of increasing demand by consumers to track where products come from and how they have been produced.

The more you explore, the more you discover and the more you become aware of the existing gaps. In this context, humility is the way forward. Yet, humility shouldn’t prevent the industry to be proud of its contribution to our daily lives and future challenges.

Let’s start with the impacts: every industry generates impacts. Those affecting the environment are increasingly being approached in a holistic way, through a life cycle assessment analysis. Not so long ago, the feed sector used to rely on a set of metrics, from FCR to FFDR and FIFO ratios.

It is now widely established that no progress could be made based on an approach with so many blind spots and isolated metrics. The Global Feed Lifecycle Institute (GFLI) provides the framework that the industry needs to collect data and interpret them in a consistent manner. We don’t need more frameworks, we just need? a consistent and objective approach.

This brings us to the legal framework. How the industry must back up sustainability claims (environmental, social, governance) is becoming a key topic. With two EU Directives in the pipeline (Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition on the one hand, Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence on the other hand), we are seeing a?shift in responsibility.?A series of recent reports and lawsuits related to seafood sustainability claims and eco-labels are impacting seafood businesses.

Every business now has to broaden its scope of analysis, and taking all these dimensions into account is precisely what the Global Roundtable on Marine Ingredients has been doing since its launch in 2021.

Finally, let’s consider the methodology and available tools. It has to be acknowledged that no industry is perfect. Similarly, no feed ingredient is perfect. To establish this, IFFO, alongside a cohort of world-renowned nutritionists, has conducted the first ever SWOT* analysis on all protein sources used in aquafeeds and has just published its findings in open access. What we understand from this review is that every ingredient has strengths and weaknesses. In many cases, the weaknesses of one ingredient can be matched with the strengths of other ingredients to identify opportunities for complementarity.

This sobering conclusion around complementarity of ingredients also applies to the tools that exist. They all need to be understood as a part of set of tools, which need to be used in complementarity with others.

A combination of regulations, law enforcement measures, certification standards, collective initiatives such as fishery improvement projects can make a difference and have proven so.

*SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats