Blog: Toolbox for businesses for legal, ethical and traceable seafood now freely available

Date: April 27, 2021

Author: PAS 1550 Working Group (WWF-UK, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Environmental Justice Foundation)

The PAS 1550:2017 is a Code of Practice that was developed by consensus with many stakeholders from the seafood industry along with the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), The Pew Charitable Trusts, Oceana and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). 

This Code of Practice provides detailed recommendations and best practice advice to support industry’s due diligence efforts to assess and minimise the risk of seafood stemming from illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing sources. Reflecting the growing concerns of businesses regarding human rights issues in seafood supply chains, it also includes recommendations designed to help industry assess whether imports were produced adhering to decent working standards, with reference to the requirements of the International Labour Organization’s Work in Fishing Convention (ILO C188).

This practical document for businesses can be considered a wide-ranging ‘toolbox’ that includes guidance on information that can be requested by processors, importers, buyers and other seafood supply chain actors as part of their existing in-house due diligence processes and risk assessments. This includes recommendations to establish robust traceability systems to enable tracking from origin to end-product

The Code of Practice was co-developed with leading experts from the seafood industry, originally under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI). It was published under licence from the BSI and came into effect on 31 July 2017. 

To ensure it is readily available to anyone in the global seafood industry, EJF, Pew and WWF have made the Code of Practice freely available for download through the Fish Forward 2 Project, which is co-funded by the European Union. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views of the EU.

You can get your copy for free here or by directly mailing one of the contact persons below for your personal PDF copy.


Contact details:

Hayley Swanlund (WWF-UK), hswanlund@wwf.org.uk

Kristine Beran (Pew), kberan@pewtrusts.org

Max Schmid (EJF), max.schmid@ejfoundation.org

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