Progress on Animal Welfare in Aquaculture Certifications: Aquatic Life Institute Launches Second Annual Benchmark Report
Aquatic Life Institute (ALI) has launched the second edition of the aquaculture certification benchmark tool that analyzes current welfare requirements within the primary farming standards of 7 global seafood certification schemes.
The first edition of the benchmark informed organizations, consumers, producers, retailers, and seafood labeling programs of aquatic animal welfare as a high priority item in the certification industry. This second edition further clarifies and highlights the criteria and interventions that translate into meaningful changes to improve and implement positive welfare practices for farmed aquatic animals.
The primary assessment areas include Aquatic Life Institute’s five pillars of aquatic animal welfare: water quality, stocking density and space requirements, environmental enrichment, feed composition, and stunning and slaughter. This second edition also includes the evaluation of certifiers’ responses to concerns regarding new species entering the aquaculture supply chain and harmful practices that already exist within: rejecting the introduction of octopus/cephalopod farming, banning insects for use in fish feed and prohibiting the egregious practice of eye-stalk ablation in shrimp farming.
This report aims to highlight the current animal welfare standards in the industry, but also identifies opportunities to improve conditions for aquatic animals in farms. We are highly encouraged by certifiers responses and engagement with the evaluation process, and their commitment to transparency and accountability.
The top ranked certifier in this version is Aquaculture Stewardship Council’s draft of their upcoming farm standard which includes strong and continuous monitoring and evaluation requirements for farmers related to key welfare indicators including water quality parameters and stocking density considerations. Best practices for stunning to guarantee animals are unconscious at the time of slaughter are also adequately addressed in this standard.
We evaluated ASC’s farm standard draft to encourage the certifier to include all the meaningful animal welfare interventions in the final version. However, it is important to note that ASC’s final scores are subject to change based on what is or is not included in final standard documents shared with the public. The Farm Standard will be released for final public consultation in March 2024 and it will become effective in the fall of 2025. The Interpretation Manual will likely go out for public consultation in March 2024 as well.
Progress in the field
ALI’s report shows remarkable progress in the certification industry in areas such as environmental enrichment, which is increasingly being considered as a key aspect in ensuring positive experiences for the animals. Most evaluated certifiers already include or plan to include enrichment in their interventions. This trend is encouraging and could also potentially enhance research for different species and types of enrichment.
The importance of banning octopus farming before it starts is also a clear statement for certifiers like RSPCA and Friend of the Sea, as they acknowledge it is impossible to guarantee high welfare conditions for this species due to its behavior, sentience and carnivorous diet.
Finally, egregious industry practices such as eye-stalk ablation, the removal of one or both eyestalks from female shrimp to hasten sexual reproduction, is currently banned by most certifiers that were evaluated, and also by retailers such as Marks and Spencer in the UK. We hope this practice is banned soon from the industry as a whole.
Aquatic Life Institute will continue working with certifications to continuously raise welfare standards and foster scientific and technological innovation in the aquaculture industry.
Next steps
Aquatic Life Institute will continue raising the bar for aquaculture certification standards every year to ensure continuous progress towards reducing suffering of aquatic animals. The highly impactful nature of certifier engagement, where a single change in a standard language can impact hundreds of millions of animals, encourages us to continue working in this space. We have also started engaging with corporations in the food industry to gauge interest in implementing certification in their supply chains, if they are not currently doing so, and improving aquatic animal welfare overall. The benchmark continues to be a key tool in our stakeholder engagement with industry, governments and multilateral bodies, and also supports the global advocacy efforts to reduce animal suffering in aquaculture.