Advancing the Global Marketplace for Sustainable Seafood: The Seafood Choices Alliance - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 146

collapsed. With these limitations in mind, the Seafood Choices Alliance tackles
the challenges of the world's fisheries through an entirely different lens. Stealing a
page from other social marketing success stories, the Seafood Choices Movement
enables everyone that purchases seafood to affect change though their daily buying
decisions.
The fundamental work of the Alliance is to build a marketplace for sustainable
seafood - to affect lasting change in fisheries policy while also moving the leaders
of the food industry to leverage major market change. To achieve this, the Alliance
seeks out opportunities to harness market forces and the power of consumer choice
in favour of ocean conservation and to make the issue increasingly relevant and
salient to a growing collection of influential leaders. Like the American Automobile
Association working to promote and empower the car industry or the Organic Trade
Association seeking to advance and transform the marketplace for organic products,
the Seafood Choices Alliance is working to advance the issue of sustainable seafood
and empower the industry to transform the marketplace. It also plays a unique role
providing leadership to the movement as a whole by engaging an expanded set of
leaders from the food sector and encouraging greater collaboration and consistency
among the conservation community. The ultimate goal is a world where all those
affiliated with the seafood industry - from fishermen and fish farmers to distributors,
retailers, restaurants and consumers - act on the belief that a healthy ocean is vital
to human life and essential to ensuring a sustainable supply of seafood for all to
enjoy.

7.1.4 Shifting perceptions and attitudes

The Seafood Choices Alliance is in many ways the 'drumbeat' of activity that helps
keep the issue of sustainable seafood consistently in the press when individual
members' activities cannot. It provides a contextual framework in which these
individual programmes and businesses can be positioned in the minds of the media,
policymakers and others as leaders of something that is collectively much larger
and has much further reach. In so doing, it serves to 'prime the pump' and condition
the media, policy and seafood sector climates in support of conservation.
The Seafood Choices Movement has significantly changed attitudes within the
media and the seafood industry. When the Alliance started its work, most commen-
tary from the industry and in the media seemed to echo one consumer rights group
which asked rhetorically: 'What can you say about a group of alarmist publicity-
seekers whose greatest passion is “saving” fish species that aren't even endangered?
Are they crazy? Power-hungry?' (Center for Consumer Freedom 2007).
Just 7 years later, a dramatic shift is evident, and the Alliance has a well-earned
seat at the table as a reliable resource and a pragmatic, honest broker to its food
industry members. A strong sign of the shift in industry's perception of the move-
ment appeared in late 2004, when a cover story in the industry's major trade journal
SeaFood Business suggested 'now that sustainable sourcing is on the minds of the