What is GSSI and will it impact how you buy seafood?
SEAFOODNEWS.COM By John Sackton and Peggy Parker Nov. 13, 2014
Seafood buyers and suppliers are coming together over something called GSSI - and if it is successful, sustainability will become a norm in the seafood industry; not an arena for brand competition.
Such an outcome would go a long way towards normalizing long term sustainability for wild caught fisheries, and establish that sustainability, like food safety and sanitation, is a given for seafood buyers, not something to be negotiated separately for each purchase.
GSSI stands for Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative. It is modeled on a successful global retail program called GFSI - the Global Food Safety Initiative.
The initial draft of the GSSI standards, released for public comments in June, attracted a lot of industry and FAO comments regarding whether the draft was sufficiently focused on the core mission of providing a benchmark for sustainability certification that would reduce market confusion. In particular, the FAO and may industry commenters focused on the fact that GSSI was considered a multi-tiered system based on rankings, rather than a simple pass / fail system to certify meeting FAO standards on sustainability. They argued this approach undermined the basic reason a global initiative was undertaken.
The GSSI Steering Board will meet on December 10-11, 2014 in Amsterdam to address these and other concerns ...
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