- The world’s most influential seafood companies and industry associations mostly lobby against environmental protections, a report by the U.K.-based NGO InfluenceMap found.
- The report assesses the biodiversity-related lobbying efforts of a list of the 30 most influential seafood companies in the world and 12 of the main industry associations they’re members of.
- The vast majority of the companies and industry associations engage in lobbying that’s misaligned with international biodiversity goals agreed to in a 2022 treaty.
- Industry associations told Mongabay that they support science-based policy and that the report is flawed.
The world’s biggest seafood companies might seem to have a vested interest in healthy marine ecosystems and plentiful fish stocks. Many claim a commitment to biodiversity in their public messaging. Yet a new report shows they mostly lobby against environmental protections.
InfluenceMap, a U.K.-based NGO, released the report on April 10. It assesses the biodiversity-related lobbying efforts of a list of the 30 most influential seafood companies in the world and 12 of the main industry associations they’re members of. Most of the companies are based in North America, Europe and Japan.
All but one of the 30 companies engages in lobbying that’s either partially or fully “misaligned” with international biodiversity goals agreed to in a 2022 U.N. treaty, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the report says. Likewise, all but two of the industry associations predominantly lobby governments to obstruct progress toward those goals, it says.
“Overwhelmingly the engagement that we found was pretty negative and targeting a number of different policy types that have an impact on marine biodiversity,” Rebecca Vaughan, director of methodologies and program development at InfluenceMap and co-author of the report, told Mongabay.
“These companies are also members of industry associations that have been overwhelmingly lobbying to weaken and delay policy,” she added.
Industry associations told Mongabay that they support science-based policy and that the report is flawed.
The report is one of the first assessments of the global seafood industry’s lobbying efforts. It draws on 2019 research from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a multilateral scientific body, that shows major losses to marine biodiversity that are largely driven by overfishing and habitat destruction.
InfluenceMap looked at the 30 “most systemically important” seafood companies from a list made by the World Benchmarking Alliance, a Netherlands-based NGO that says it seeks to “hold companies accountable for contributing to sustainable development.” The sector includes both fishing and industrial aquaculture interests. InfluenceMap chose the 12 lobby groups based on geography and membership by the 30 companies.
This was InfluenceMap’s first foray into examining how lobbying affects marine biodiversity. The group is best known for its investigations into climate lobbying.
“Going into this, we didn’t know very much about what the seafood sector lobbying would look like,” Vaughan said.
She and co-author Cameron Walsh gathered data from 2020 through March 2025 from a wide range of sources, including public statements, media reports, financial disclosures, voluntary environmental disclosures, regulatory consultation comments, freedom of information act requests, company websites and social media. Each piece of data contributed to the relevant company or lobby group’s score in one of 11 categories aligned with the 2022 treaty goals, such as preventing overexploitation or reducing pollution. For example, a position paper by the Brussels-based lobby group Europêche showing its opposition to an EU plan to limit or phase out bottom trawling affected the group’s score in the overexploitation category.
They found that the three policy types that faced the greatest pushback from industry were restrictions on bottom trawling; regulation of aquaculture; and the development of marine protected areas. The vast majority of the pushback against MPAs was against their general expansion, not against specific MPAs, Vaughan said.
Vaughan and Walsh used the 11 category scores to give each company an overall grade that incorporated its direct lobbying as well as lobbying done by industry associations it belongs to, and weighed recent data more heavily than that from, say, four or five years ago. They gave grades to 23 of the companies, but couldn’t for the remaining seven due to lack of data.
Only one company received a B or above, meeting InfluenceMap’s threshold for alignment with international goals: Bolton Group, an Italy-based multinational. Thai Union, a Thailand-based multinational, was a close second, receiving a B-. Cooke Aquaculture, a Canada-based multinational, received the lowest grade, an F; the company did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment.
The two industry associations groups with the best record were U.K.-based North Atlantic Pelagic Advocacy Group and Sweden-based SeaBOS, which received scores of A- and B-, respectively. The three associations with the worst lobbying ratings were Europêche, a Brussels-based outfit that received an E-, and two U.S.-based associations: the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), which received an E-, and the West Coast Seafood Processors Association (WCSPA), which received an F. Europêche declined a request for comment from Mongabay. The two U.S.-based lobby groups defended their approaches.
“NFI does not oppose efforts to preserve biodiversity, but we do oppose non-science-based regulations driven by hyperbole that are neither reasonable nor responsible when looked at through a holistic sustainability lens,” Gavin Gibbons, NFI’s chief strategy officer, told Mongabay in an email.
WCSPA dismissed the report’s findings.
“WCSPA member companies are world leaders in sustainability and environmental responsibility,” Lori Steele, WCSPA’s executive director, told Mongabay in an emailed statement. “The InfluenceMap Report is misleading, inaccurate, and frankly, quite offensive. The ‘findings’ highlight the researchers’ obvious bias inherent throughout the report from start to finish. WCSPA is proud of its track record of working in partnership with state, federal, and tribal managers to protect the ocean environment while also providing access to certified sustainable seafood products that have global markets.”
NFI supported an April 17 executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump to deregulate the seafood sector. Vaughan suggested the contents of the order showed how much political power the industry has. The order “honestly reads like a shopping list of the industry demands that we’ve been tracking,” she said.
The report found that the firms’ public messaging on biodiversity conservation often contradicts their “largely oppositional engagement on specific regulations aimed at policymakers through meetings and consultations.”
Liam Campling, a political economist and fisheries expert at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved with the report, said this was unsurprising.
“I think what’s important about this report is that it highlights something that we’ve all known for a long time — that claims around biodiversity support issued by the largest multinationals in the seafood industry often have a significant gap or tension with practices,” he told Mongabay.
Vaughan said the data they found may be only the “tip of the iceberg” as transparency on lobbying is lacking. At the government level, disclosures of lobbying activity vary across countries and jurisdictions. The European Union, for example, is generally more transparent than the U.S. in disclosing details of lobbying meetings with lawmakers or government officials, whereas U.S. transparency rules make it easier to read comments that companies leave on government consultations for pending regulation than in Europe, Vaughan said. The U.K. seems to be less transparent on lobbying than either the U.S. or the EU, she said.
At the company level, the report says there’s little disclosure of policy positions, with most of the 30 firms showing “no” to “limited” transparency — that is, what they disclose on their websites generally doesn’t match the lobbying work they’re doing. Disclosure was even worse when the lobbying on their behalf by industry associations is accounted for.
“More transparency from governments and companies … is key and this is something we hope to make the case for in our work,” Vaughan said in an email.
Campling noted that the World Benchmarking Alliance list was drawn up with the idea that corporate “keystone actors” are potential catalysts of change — an approach that has its limits, he said. Long-term, systemic change needs to happen at the political or governmental level, he said. Vaughan said she agreed, and that InfluenceMap’s theory of change accounts for the fact that “government regulation is absolutely critical.”
Only one Chinese company cracked the top 30, which Campling said was surprising given the fact that China makes up roughly 15% of global fisheries catch. He said he wasn’t sure whether this was because of a lack of consolidation of major firms in China or because of WBA’s methodology. In any case, the dearth of Chinese firms left a gap in the report’s findings, he said. Vaughan said they followed the WBA list, focusing on the world’s most influential companies that would have the “greatest potential impact on policy.”
Campling generally praised the report and said more of this kind of work is needed. He said the hard realities of living in a world run by governments like Trump’s mean that corporate reform efforts take on more value, at least in the short term.
“A lot of people will continue to be eating seafood, and it’s very likely that large multinationals will be playing a role in the provision of that seafood, and so targeting them on the ground through direct action naming and shaming, as well as targeting them behind the scenes in terms of their access to finance or their access to discounted finance … that’s all good,” Campling said. “But ultimately, regulation is always going to be the key.”
Banner image: Sardines captured by a fishing vessel. Image courtesy of Nicolas Job / Ocean Image Bank.
Citation:
Bongaarts, J. (2019). IPBES, 2019. Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the intergovernmental science‐policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Population and Development Review, 45(3), 680-681. doi:10.1111/padr.12283
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