With almost 24 kg/year/per capita, Europeans are, after Asians, world champion consumers of seafood. The European Union depends heavily on imports for feeding its citizens’ appetite for fish.
In 2021, it imported 6.2 million tonnes of fisheries and aquaculture products, approximately 60% of the total consumption. Even though the EU seafood market is one of the most lucrative in the world, seafood and fisheries are often overlooked in food and trade policies and bilateral agreements.
The growth of international fish trade brings benefits to many developing countries, but it also poses risks of human and labour rights violations, environmental damage, land and sea grabbing, and corruption. In a globalized world, multinational companies– many of them with a European parent company – have acquired extraordinary power, especially in developing countries, where they have taken advantage of poor governance and weaker regulations. While the parent companies are required to uphold high standards for their operations in Europe, they often enact little to no due diligence on their partners, subsidiaries, or suppliers in third developing countries.
Due diligence means that multinational companies should make sure that their businesses do not harm host communities nor prevent the sustainable development of host countries. While the presence of multinational companies has helped developing countries create employment and opportunities-, often these same companies unduly benefit from exploiting weak domestic regulation on environment or labour. This focus on companies does not remove the responsibility of governments to protect human rights, but rather acknowledges the power and bargaining capacity these multinationals can muster. Companies sometimes have more capital than the GDP of developing countries where they operate. Victims of abuses perpetrated by these companies find it almost impossible to get reparation in the courts due to lack of legislation, poor governance, or blatantly corrupt judicial systems.
For decades, civil society organisations have been denouncing abuses while at the same time demanding stricter regulation for multinational companies. The international community has only managed to agree on voluntary sustainable standards touching upon different aspects of due diligence. The European Union regulation is also fragmented. There is for example, a non-financial reporting directive, which brings the voluntary approach for companies to publish what they do to protect the environment, the labour rights of their employees and other social responsibility matters.
After the Rana Plaza scandal, the European Parliament called for a sector specific due diligence for the fashion industry. There are some limited regulations bringing effective enforcement in the case of conflict-related minerals and timber, or a directive on unfair trading practices which does not cover the full value chain. For fisheries, the Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated (IUU) regulation and EU sanitary standards do hold companies to account, but do not cover environmental and social sustainability matters.
The European Parliament (EP) has long been advocating a stronger legal framework and in 2018 it adopted a resolution calling for such a legislation to be developed. In its Farm to Fork strategy, the European Commission suggested the development of a legislation to prevent imports of products associated with deforestation and human rights violations. The Food Policy Coalition, a coalition of CSOs advocating for sustainable food systems, welcomed this, however deplored that no measures were suggested “to reduce the overall consumption of such products, animal feed being a case in point.” With such expectation raised, however, the Commission fell short and announced in November 2021 a policy only for products related to deforestation. Finally, in February 2022, it came up with a proposal for a corporate sustainability due diligence directive (CSDDD), in a common position with the Council. On 1 June 2023, the EP agreed on a position, which allowed for trilogue negotiations to start. The Spanish presidency is expected to push for an outcome before the end of the year.