The Global Tuna Alliance (GTA) is an independent group of retailers and tuna supply chain companies.
Through a collaborative agreement with the World Economic Forum, we have spent the past 12 months implementing the objectives laid out in Forum’s Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration alongside Friends of Ocean Action. We have worked with many organizations to find industry-wide solutions to efficiently implement the Declaration commitments.
With the Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration ending in a few months, it is now time to look ahead, beyond 2020, and our new 5-year strategic plan sets out our direction up to 2026.
Our 5-year strategic plan (Fig. 1) is much broader than the original aim of the GTA: realising harvest strategies for tuna fisheries. Our involvement in implementing the Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration has stimulated this expansion; with Partners realising that our pre-competitive collaboration has the potential to not only improve environmental sustainability, but to also improve traceability, reduce illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) and progress work on human rights in tuna fisheries.
Figure 1: GTA 5 Year Strategy Outline
In addition, the Friends of Ocean Action is looking to develop a refreshed commitment to build on the momentum generated by the Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration, and the Global Tuna Alliance’s achievements with Partners.
The refreshed commitment will again be registered as a ‘Voluntary Commitment for implementation of the UN SDGs’ and the Friends of Ocean Action is keen to continue the collaboration with the Global Tuna Alliance to achieve greater support for the signatories to deliver measurable impact.
To maximise the impact of the refreshed commitment, it will be aligned to our 5 Year Strategy and the market will be invited to participate in the wording of the commitment to ensure it is business-driven, ambitious but realistic. The Global Tuna Alliance will monitor progress of signatories to the refreshed commitment.
Going forward, the drafting of the refreshed commitment will begin in October, with a formal launch scheduled for early 2021.