The future of seafood is bait-to-plate transparency on the blockchain

Cook declines to say how much the pilot is costing exactly, although he does say, “It’s not nearly as much as I thought it would be.”

The hope is that guaranteed traceability will help curb the worst practices in the seafood industry as eaters, retailers, and distributors demand proof that their seafood was caught using sustainable practices, by legal operators and fairly paid workers. “Bait-to-plate transparency using the blockchain will mean there is no place to hide for illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing or those operators who use slave labour or impose horrific conditions,” said WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O’Gorman in a January press release.

However, those working on implementing the pilot in Fiji have few illusions that the blockchain is a fail-proof solution for cleaning up exploitation and abuse in the supply chain.

The blockchain itself is generally understood to be an immutable ledger, secure both because it is distributed across many nodes, not a single server, and because entries are cemented into the record using cryptography. (You can read my piece about its emerging use in food safety here.)

That said, the characteristics that define the technology are still disputed, and the more often the word “blockchain” is used, the fuzzier its meaning becomes.

But whether or not the blockchain functions perfectly as advertised is almost irrelevant in this case, because the sprawling seafood industry is leaky as a sieve.

“Blockchain is not going to be a switch that we flick and overnight it’s gonna change things,” says Cook. “You’re never going to eliminate the potential for fraud and malfeasance.” Not completely, at least.

Furthermore, even if U.S. and E.U. eaters start putting pressure on the industry to be more transparent and to act lawfully, those in other countries might not be so demanding. “If you’ve got a country of two billion people that just doesn’t give a shit, and they’re willing to buy anything from anywhere, it’s not going to have the same kind of impact that we would hope it would,” says Cook. “In China and India, which both have an increasing middle-class, and greater consumption of seafood, it’s going to take more than just a blockchain traceability solution to make it influential globally as far as addressing these bad actors and bad practices, whether it’s illegal fishing or human rights violations.”

Even with an expanding network of supply chain traceability, tainted fish could still work their way into Americans’ lives in surprising ways. A stunning 2015 Associated Press report on slavery in the seafood industry found that slave-caught fish ended up on America’s retail shelves through popular cat food brands like Fancy Feast, Meow Mix, and Iams. Perhaps a diner at an upscale restaurant would demand to see proof of origin for her lightly-seared tuna steak—but would she demand the same of a case of cat food she ordered from Amazon? As Katarina Zimmer reported for The New Food Economy late last summer, we are only just beginning to understand the extent of seafood’s “dark web.”

Cook and others are driven to do something about the problem—and for now, that something is blockchain. But for him, it’s a personal endeavor, too. His passion for pinpointing some of the seafood industry’s most egregious violations comes from more than just a lifetime spent on the water. It also comes from the loss of a like-minded friend.

Cook says he grew up messing about on boats on the Texas Gulf Coast. His father and grandfather were fishermen—his grandfather even built his own plywood shrimp boat. As a young man, Cook spent six years in the navy, traveling around the Pacific Rim. In every place he visited he heard that fishing was not what it used to be.

After leaving the navy, Cook studied fisheries and aquaculture at Texas A&M University in College Station, and then natural resource and environmental law at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Eventually, after joining the Peace Corps with his wife and spending two years in Fiji doing small-scale conservation work, a position opened up at the WWF leading its tuna management program.

In 2011, Cook met a man named Keith Davis through the Association for Professional Observers, a non-profit organization for the ocean monitors who accompany fishing boats on multi-week fishing expeditions in international waters and report back to government agencies and NGOs about the impacts of fishing on the marine environment. Though they are not empowered to stop illegal activity, observers are on board to sound the alarm about fishing in prohibited areas, smuggling prohibited catches like shark fins, and human rights abuses, and their solitary job is often at odds with that of the crew. They are, in many cases, the only sources of independently collected information on the vessels’ daily catch. And it’s their information that resource managers use to set fishing quotas. It’s high-stakes, dangerous work—especially in international waters, where law enforcement is spotty at best.

On a clear September day in 2015, according to reporting from Hakai Magazine, Davis went missing off the coast of Peru while working on a Panamanian vessel with ownership ties to Japan. “A lot of people try and soften it,” Cook says. “They say, ‘Oh, well he disappeared, we don’t really know what happened,’ and I say that’s bullshit. He was a 16-year veteran observer; he, alongside several others of us who were part of the Association for Professional Observers, wrote the manual on observer safety … every circumstance surrounding what happened indicates that he was murdered.”

When Cook first heard of his friend’s disappearance, he says, he wanted the Panamanian company that owned the ship—Gran Victoria International—to be held accountable. He reached out to everyone he knew to see if someone could get the vessel stranded dockside, but failed. As Hakai reported, the Victoria was a tuna “transshipment” vessel, so once the product entered the supply chain, it was a lost cause. Transshipment, put simply, means the transfer of fish from smaller boats to larger ‘motherships’ that carry the catch to port. It’s a little-known industry practice that can often obscure suspicious transactions conducted in international waters. Cook couldn’t put pressure on the companies buying and selling the product because he didn’t know who they were.

“It was really frustrating for me because we kind of suspected what was going to happen,” Cook says. “We knew that the Panamanian government, which was the flag state, was very likely going to do a cursory investigation and sweep it under the rug, and that’s exactly what happened. And as a result, I don’t think there will ever be justice for Keith. I don’t think he’ll ever get the justice he deserves and a murder will go unpunished.”

Online investigative magazine Reveal reports that Cook had long been documenting the suspect practices and lousy working conditions he observed while at sea. But Cook believes that things might have been different if there were a well-established seafood industry traceability platform, like the one he is working on for WWF.

“If we had something like that in place, if we had a traceability system where you could tell beyond a shadow of a doubt, instantaneously, through an automated auditing mechanism where that fish was coming from and whose hands it passed through, we could easily have stranded that ship at the dock and made sure that no market anywhere would be willing—it would have been a poison pill to accept that shipment,” Cook says. “We could have forced the hand of that company and that vessel and the government to actually do something.”

But Davis’s death also underscores how difficult an undertaking cleaning up the seafood industry will be. If the industry’s worst actors are either so unscrupulous or so desperate that they threaten or even harm the few people responsible for ensuring international laws are followed; if they systematically force people into de facto slavery, forging their work documents when necessary; if they hide far out at sea, transferring their hauls to cargo ships disguised as legitimate catches, changing ship names and flags to evade detection and avoid prosecution—then a blockchain-based traceability platform isn’t going to stop them.

Katafono said the first U.S. shipment of blockchain-tracked tuna is headed to Brooklyn, where it is supposed to be served at a conference hosted by the blockchain company ConsenSys (a parent of sorts to Viant). Tickets to the Ethereal Summit in May, an event promoted as the “SXSW of blockchain,” will set you back $1,250—a pretty premium indeed. Although, of course, you’re buying access to more than just tuna.