Ethical reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic in the global seafood industry: navigating diverse scales and contexts of marine values and identities

Abstract

The global crisis instantiated by the COVID-19 pandemic opens a unique governance window to transform the sustainability, resilience, and ethics of the global seafood industry. Simultaneously crippling public health, civil liberties, and national economies, the global pandemic has exposed the diverse values and identities of actors upon which global food systems pivot, as well as their interconnectivity with other economic sectors and spheres of human activity. In the wake of COVID-19, ethics offers a timely conceptual reframing and methodological approach to navigate these diverse values and identities and to reconcile their ensuing policy trade-offs and conflicts. Values and identities denote complex concepts and realities, characterized by plurality, fluidity and dynamics, ambiguity, and implicitness, which often hamper responsive policy-setting and effective governance. Rather than adopt a static characterization of specific value or identity types, I introduce a novel hierarchical conceptualization of values and identities made salient by scale and context. I illustrate how salient values and identities emerge at multiple scales through three seafood COVID-19 contextual examples in India, Canada, and New Zealand, where diverse seafood actors interact within local, domestic (regional/national), and global seafood value chains, respectively. These examples highlight the differential values and identities, and hence differential vulnerabilities, resilience, and impacts on seafood actors with the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitate differentiated policy interventions if they are to be responsive to those affected. An ethical governance framework that integrates diverse marine values and identities, buttressed by concrete deliberation and decision-support protocols and tools, can transform the modus operandi of global seafood systems toward both sustainable and ethical development.

Impacts of COVID-19 on people and sea: marine social science imaginations

“…Several of the contributions included in the special issue demonstrate how the extraordinary consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic can be used as a lens through which existing structures and dynamics of vulnerability, as well as the set of obstacles and opportunities for adaptive responses, become acutely visible. Bassett et al ( 2022 ), Manlosa et al ( 2021 ), Khan et al ( 2021 ), Marschke et al ( 2021 ), and Lam ( 2021 ) all probe vulnerabilities in relation to marine food systems and supply chains. Bassett et al ( 2022 ) examine the disruption of fishery supply chains by the pandemic to comparatively assess the vulnerability and resilience of small-scale fisheries supply chains in diverse settings of Indonesia, Philippines, Canada, and the USA.…”

“…Taking a distinctly different perspective, Lam ( 2021 ) proposes that COVID-19 has opened up a unique window for transforming the sustainability and ethics of the global seafood industry. Through a conceptualization of how seafood industry actors’ diverse values and identities are made salient by both scale and context, the author provides empirical examples from India, Canada, and New Zeeland in a plea for ethical governance frameworks that integrates diverse values and identities.…”