June 3, 2020 — The Global Tuna Alliance has today published a ‘Traceability Toolkit’ as an important step towards achieving our mission to support implementation of the Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration.

At the United Nations Ocean Conference in 2017, sixty-six companies, including retailers and other tuna supply chain businesses, signed the World Economic Forum’s Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration with the aim of stopping illegal tuna getting to market, and promoting improvements in environmental sustainability and human rights in tuna fisheries. As the name suggests, traceability – or tracking products from vessel to the final buyer – is a key component of the Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration. The Global Tuna Alliance, an inclusive constituency of companies with a major interest in improving the sustainability of the tuna sector, is working to implement the objectives laid out in the Declaration.

We believe that improving traceability will significantly improve existing sustainability initiatives and shows the greatest promise for scalability into mainstream commercial activities. The Tuna Traceability Commitment of the Declaration asks signatories to commit to the following action by 2020:

We pledge that all tuna products in our supply chains will be fully traceable to the vessel and trip dates, and that this information will be disclosed upon request at the Point of Sale either on the packaging or via an online system.

The new Traceability Toolkit, the first of four – one for each commitment[1] – provides support to

signatories in meeting the traceability commitment: including a discussion of what is traceability, the benefits of traceability and how the commitment can be met.

The toolkit was produced with assistance and input from the Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability (SALT) team at FishWise, the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) team and the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), particularly on how these initiatives can support signatories.

[1] Traceability, Social Responsibility, Environmental Sustainability and Government Partnership