The Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability (SALT) has been created through a partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Walton Family Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Coordinated by FishWise, a non-profit sustainable seafood consultancy, SALT is being developed as a global alliance for knowledge exchange and action to promote legal and sustainable fisheries through improved transparency in seafood supply chains.

In the initial year of SALT a co-design process is underway that includes a series of DataLabs to involve stakeholders from around the world to help identify the biggest problems where collective action is needed to develop impactful solutions. The EU/Africa DataLab was held in London, UK on March 21st and 22nd 2018 and brought together representatives from businesses, governments, foundations, and organizations primarily from the European Union and Africa, to identify specific traceability problems that require collaboration to solve. December 2017 saw the DataLab Americas hosted in California and there will be a third DataLab in Asia later in 2018.

Issues that were discussed in the EU/Africa DataLab included illegal transhipment, incentives for governments to mandate transparency, harmonisation of traceability systems and reporting on learning from failure.

Elsa Patria, Chair of Stop Illegal Fishing welcomed the opportunity to participate in the EU/Africa DataLab, commenting, “The challenges inherent in preventing and identifying illegality in the seafood supply chain and introducing traceability schemes are significant. SALT offers great scope for pooling effort and resources to tackle some of the major challenges and Stop Illegal Fishing looks forward to continuing their involvement with this initiative.”

SALT aims to identify common problems to solve through collaboration, to foster key relationships, facilitating learning across pilot sites to promote innovation, and expand the use of emerging good practices to improve on legality and traceability in the seafood supply chain. These improvements will ultimately help to address food security, labour rights, and marine biodiversity conservation.