The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), an organization with its own label for responsibly farmed seafood, opened its accreditation process for Tilapia on March 21 2012. This marks the essential first step towards farmed, ASC-certified seafood in supermarkets in a couple of months. ASC-certified tilapia will be available in Canadian, Dutch, French, Swedish, Danish and English supermarkets this summer. The ASC label indicates that the fish farm produces in an ecological and social responsible way.

Bas Geerts, Standards Director ASC, explains: “Since fish farming is one of the fastest growing food production systems in the world, its growth experiences some serious environmental and social ‘growing pains’. To address these social and environmental impacts the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) initiated a series of eight global dialogue processes to develop standards in 2004. These multi-year, multi-stakeholder processes will lead to eight standards (four of which are final by now). As a crucial next step ASC developed a robust certification system for independent certifiers which will be used to certify fish farms globally. Only farms which meet ASC’s strict requirements for responsibly farmed seafood will be allowed to get the ASC label on their products. The first companies have already shown interest and will get this quality mark in 2012. ASC launches the standards in stages to the market, starting first with tilapia (March 2012) and pangasius (April 2012), followed by the bivalves and abalones a few months later. Standards for salmon, shrimp, and trout are in their final draft versions, and are expected to be handed to ASC later in 2012.”

NewForesight supports ASC with a variety of projects, ranging from preparation for the accreditation process to internally benchmarking the various ASC standards. We wish ASC the best of luck with launching the standards in the coming period.  In the future ASC aims to include other fish species to its program.

For more information about ASC click here

May 15 Lucas Simons gives a keynote speech at the Societal Café ‘The three Ps of food security’ (het Maatschappelijk Café ‘De drie P’s van voedselzekerheid), where (SME) entrepreneurs that contribute to a sustainable economy are the central theme. Lucas will talk about the role that entrepreneurs play to bring about a market driven system change in the agricultural sector in Africa that is required to realize food security. In 2011 the World Economic Forum appointed Lucas as Young Global Leader for his dedication and performance in the field of sustainable trade, agriculture and rural society development.

Complementary to the lecture, four Dutch entrepreneurs will pitch the way they contribute to worldwide food security with a commercial approach. Hence, not out of philanthropy but as part of business operations. Furthermore, there is a House of Commons debate and the best entrepreneur of the evening will be elected.

In the last decade six out of ten world’s fastest growing economies were in Africa. At the same time food security keeps on being challenging for this continent regardless of all the technology and support. The Societal Café is initiated by the consultancy company Schuttelaar & Partners together with Wageningen UR, KLV, the ministry of EL&I, MVO Nederland, StartLife and UtrechtInc. They believe there are great opportunities for Dutch trade and industry to participate in the African economic progress and to contribute to local food security at the same time.  

The event takes place at the 'Caballerofabriek' in The Hague. Entrance is free.

To register click here

For more information click here