Chris Chase

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations' Committee on Fisheries (COFI) has endorsed a new set of guidelines for aquaculture designed to develop a set of best practices for the industry worldwide.

The Guidelines for Sustainable Aquaculture (GSA) was designed with the aid of NOAA and other stakeholders and officially endorsed by COFI at the committee’s 36th session in Rome, Italy. The new guidelines come after the

Russian Federation Deputy Prime Minister and Presidential Plenipotentiary Envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District Yuri Trutnev has pledged to double the Sakhalin Region’s seafood processing capacity in the next five years. 

The Sakhalin Region, located in Russia’s Far East, was responsible for 774,700 metric tons (MT) of Russia’s fish and seafood catch in 2023 – or roughly 15 percent of the country’s catch.

A group of NGOs have sent a letter to separate seafood distributors and retailers asking for an update on their investigations into whether their supply chains were exposed to Uyghur or North Korean labor. 

The letter calls for an update on the investigations companies said they were performing in the wake of multiple reports by the Outlaw Ocean Project on forced labor in seafood supply chains.

The letter was signed by 18 NGOs: Transitional

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is not measuring up to bycatch-monitoring standards. 

In its 60-page report, GAO outlined a number of ways in which NFMS has failed to adequately tackle bycatch issues and harm to marine mammals and other species. According to the report, a central failing from the NMFS was a lack of observer coverage of fisheries.