Nota Bene Podcast Ep. 145
Tuna Sustainability: A Model Bigger than its Niche with ISSF President Susan Jackson
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Listen to the original podcast released September 29, 2021 here: https://www.sheppard.com/notabene-337
Seafood sustainability is becoming increasingly important in the world of environmentalism. This week’s episode features an interview with International Seafood Sustainability Foundation’s president Susan Jackson. We discuss ISSF’s history, tuna sustainability, unique partnerships between industry, scientists and NGOs, transparency in the wake of cynicism and more.
Guest:
Susan Jackson is President of ISSF, a global partnership among scientists, tuna processors, and environmental nonprofits to undertake science-based initiatives for the long-term conservation and sustainable use of tuna stocks, reducing bycatch and promoting a healthy marine ecosystem.
Prior to joining ISSF, Jackson was the vice president for government/industry relations and seafood sourcing for Del Monte Foods, where her responsibilities included government relations at the federal, state, and local levels, and acting as Del Monte’s representative to trade and industry associations. Susan was also responsible for the purchase of all raw tuna and tuna co-pack manufacturing for Del Monte’s StarKist brand. Susan joined the H.J. Heinz Company in 1997 as an attorney in the law department, later working with the company’s seafood sourcing and other areas of procurement.
Transcript:
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Welcome to episode 145 of the Nota Bene podcast. And thank you so much to all of our listeners in more than 100 nations around the planet, for your continued participation in our ongoing conversations, and for your feedback, please do keep it coming. It helps to inform our program well beyond what you may even expect or know. So please do, keep sending it my way or our way I should say.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Joining me on today's show to talk about the change industry, so to speak, in the environment and science arena is Susan Jackson. Susan has a BS degree, undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame in our common speak. She has a Juris Doctorate degree from Duke University. She's currently the president of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, the subject of today's show. Before that Susan served as the vice president of Government/Industry Relations & Seafood Sourcing for Del Monte Foods, a company that I've always been fond of because I think it started as a coffee canner in Monterey on Cannery Row.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
At least there's a boulevard in Monterey named for Del Monte, and there's a cannery named for Del Monte. So some portion when it touched my home part of the planet. Prior to Del Monte, Susan worked in seafood sourcing and other procurement areas for the H. J. Heinz Company as an executive.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
In 2008, she left Del Monte to pioneer collaboration between industry environmental groups and science in the seafood arena. And that is ISSF, which we will talk about today. Susan has given TED Talks about the venture and she gave one in 2015. She's appeared on this podcast to talk about ISSF previously, but at a very early stage of the show's history. For all I know, Susan and I were talking to ourselves or an audience of maybe four others at the time in episode four, that was almost three years ago today.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
So following the heels of a podcast last week about a catalyst for change and energy in the green hydrogen space, I immediately thought of Susan as a catalyst for change in the area of tuna sustainability in particular, a super important natural resource in this world, and thought it would be a wonderful time to have her back on the show three years later. And I'm so grateful that she accepted that invitation. Susan Jackson, welcome back to the Nota Bene podcast, this time with a real audience around the world.
Susan Jackson:
Thanks, Michael. It's great to be here.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
It's really great to have you. I really can't tell you how excited I have been to have you on the show. I have had the gift of knowing you for many, many years throughout your career and seeing it progress in these very natural stages to become this agent of change, I'll call it, in this world of seafood sustainability by doing something that no one had done before in 2008, something that was super revolutionary. And frankly, I think something that had you told most people, "I'm going to set out to do this." They would've looked at you and said, "Good luck." And given you a ticket to the back of the seat on some bus and written you off, but the facts, I think 13 years later show a very, very different story. And I'm excited to talk about it with you today. Just by way of some staging and some background for the tens of thousands of listeners who weren't with us, perhaps in episode four, tell us a little bit about ISSF. What is it and why did it come about?
Susan Jackson:
Okay, so ISSF is a partnership of tuna brands and manufacturers from around the world, tuna scientists and the NGO community, working collaboratively to improve the health of tuna stocks. Because tuna is one of their coolest features, they are really long swimmers. So they don't just stay in the Monterey bay or even stay in the waters of California or even stay in the waters of the United States. They swim all the way across oceans throughout the waters of many, many nations, throughout their lifetime. So it needs to be globally or regionally managed. So it takes players from around the world to be interested in doing the same thing so that their socks remain healthy. It takes industry from around the world and scientists from around the world and NGOs from around the world, to really be interested, if you want to make a difference in the health of the tuna stocks and their ecosystem.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
That's such a beautifully articulate description. I don't want to say it's fundamental, but it's become a bit of a backbone for a lot of ESG talk today. But in 2008, man, those letters weren't even put together. How did these things come together, 13 years ago? How did they become apparent to you and to the other stakeholders I'll call them, that joined in that joint venture you talk about, industry, NGO and science. How did that happen in 2008?
Susan Jackson:
So there were a couple, it was truly a moment in time. Number one, we had eight companies who at that point in time were still buying about half of the tuna in the world from all over the world. So we did not have a lot of industry people at the table, but enough that you were going to make a difference. There was really one scientist that was the elder statesman of tuna management and tuna science. And everybody had his number on the Rolodex. And there was a colossal failure of management in one of the ocean regions, where there was a stock that needed much stronger management. The science was clear, the science recommendations were clear and the countries met and failed seven times to enact a management measure.
Susan Jackson:
So the one tuna scientist, Jim Joseph's phone lit up with many companies calling him saying, "What can we do?" And it just was that unique moment when it was really Jim that brought the companies together and said, "Well you can start working together on tuna sustainability." And at that same time, Dr. Bill Fox left work in government at National Marine Fishery Service, went to the World Wide Fund. And he too had an idea of if we could bring an NGO together, an industry together on tuna.
Susan Jackson:
And so it was like everybody was calling each other within a short period of time and it just worked out, which now, it came together so naturally, it wasn't until you stepped back that you realized, wait a minute, we have scientists and competitors who usually hate each other. And NGOs who usually hate industry all at the table were like, "Huh, this might really be something." And now you're right. You fast forward 13 years, and everybody talks about this, public private partnerships or industry NGO collaboration like it's not a big deal. It is a big deal. And it is hard work. It was hard work then, it's hard work now, it's hard work to keep it going, but I'm glad that people think that those are a normal collection of people to put around the same table, because that's really important. And it didn't used to be that way.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Yeah. That's a super, super description. So you have this moment in 2008 where there's this spark that's flying from this confluence of recognition, if you will, that there's a failure. And all the groups at least have some common point of contact. Still, you had to bring it together, right? Just like you said, processors, who are global companies who are intense competitors around the world, not just in one location, scientists and environmental groups that are used to really compelling industry to its knees through group boycotts and all kinds of other types of things. So how do you bring all that together? Or maybe a better question, Susan might be, what were your biggest challenges at the time to bring all those folks together? What do you think is the biggest issue you faced in joining those folks to a conversation?
Susan Jackson:
I think what made it doable was Jim Joseph, the scientist, because he also had years and years and years, decades of tuna management experience. So he had a very clear vision of, if we can get industry to set up their purchasing parameters in a way that helps science and also helps build political will, then it will make it easier for the governments to do what they need to do. If we hadn't had Jim at the very beginning for that clear direction. And he was also just at a stage of his career where everybody just agreed with him, there wasn't a lot of back and forth with Jim over whether something he was saying was necessary, he just had a great balance.
Susan Jackson:
I think the biggest challenge, even though at the time, scientists understood very clearly what is scientific advice and what's a management decision. And scientists can give you really good scientific advice. And even say, "Here's a couple of management decisions you need to pick from." They'll both implement the scientific advice. And then that's where the debates happen. And it's still where the debates happen, whether it's a company or a country that catches one type of tuna using one type of gear or another company or country that sells or catches a different type of tuna using a different gear, they're going to fight over which gear should be more regulated. Right? And that is really because of the nature of the business that they're most attuned to.
Susan Jackson:
So the science says, for an example, you need to catch 20% less. Well, there's lots of different ways you can catch 20%, less, lots of different gears that could take different amounts less. That's where the fights are. And it's about, what's a reasonable and fair, but yet effective way to implement that advice that the scientists give.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
So your scientific advice was perhaps, to use your terms from a Ted Talk I watched this morning earlier preparing for our show together, the common denominator.
Susan Jackson:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
I love that phrase by the way, from your Ted Talk, I think you were advising folks interested in this arena to avoid the calculus and find the common denominator and then just take it one equation at a time from there and is an old math major that sure sounded right. And I know where it comes from as an economic major. It's not like that's not applied mathematics at a very complex level, so. But I could follow that thinking. It really did make sense. And I think he explained a bit in that story about how ISSF came together at that time and made it rather than just didn't kind of bust up. So let me talk about that. How has it lasted so long?
Susan Jackson:
I think it's lasted so long because it's almost seen as a necessity. We have the luxury of funding from the companies that enable us to fund science and to help the science bodies do research. So we're able to bring together industry partners, vessels, scientists, to do a lot of on the water research that just needs to be done. That quite frankly, without ISSF would not be happening or would be happening at a much, much slower pace. So that's one part, we've helped fill a void through really the large S of the industry supporters.
Susan Jackson:
The other thing that became very apparent is to be credible, you need to be transparent about the fact that what you say is being done is being done and transparent about the impact. And that's, I think, where we were very naive. At the beginning the scientist said, "We're just going to give you advice. And then that's what you're going to buy, and we're going to tell people that's what you're buying. And then everyone's going to just agree that this is the right method." And that is not at all what happened because first of all, as I said earlier, there's scientific advice and then there's lots of ways to implement that scientific advice. And it wasn't just industry that had differing opinions on how to implement it. Different NGOs had very different opinions on how to implement it.
Susan Jackson:
So we have NGOs as part of our stakeholders and our board as well, and they have very different opinions, but then there's also just a legitimate lack of trust that I think we under-call. And so it was in pretty short order, we realized, oh, we need to put a whole line of work around auditing these companies. We always put out rules, "Do this, do that. Only buy from vessels that have this, or do that." And we grew in that. First, we came up with the rules. We came up with the audit protocols and then we sort of consolidated, 90% of the companies are doing this, but didn't really publish individual reports. And we grew over a period of pretty quick, now that I look back on it, I would say three years from a consolidated report to now a very transparent company specific or vessel specific, depending upon the case, report of their compliance on each individual thing. And that was a big deal. And that's really what holds it together. And when I say it, I mean, not just the industry side, but the whole thing, that's what keeps the NGOs engaged. That's what keeps the scientists engaged, that notion of being very clear and transparent about the implementation of your initiatives.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
And is it self-reporting? How is that kind of measured to the market or managed to the market?
Susan Jackson:
It is not self-reporting. We have an independent third party auditor who develops the audit protocols and then audits annually against those protocols and drafts the reports, the compliance reports. And then if a company is out of compliance, we have a whole governance process around that, that is also public on our website, what that process is.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
No, that sounds important. It also sounds expensive. Who funds that?
Susan Jackson:
Industry. I don't want to say all industries, we do get some very generous grants from foundations. And for the most part, we use those funds to fund external validation of voluntary initiatives. Kind of like, if you've signed up for ISSF and your partner, your dues need to cover your compliance of the mandatory things, the auditing of the compliance of the mandatory things. But we do some voluntary initiatives as well, that are also validated and the independent funding from foundations, funds those initiatives.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
And I just throw in from what you've just said, that seems to be kind of a credit to industry, to subject themselves individually, as companies to an independent audit, without being able to control the results, knowing that those results are going to be transparent and public. That's a big deal. A lot of companies don't have the courage to do that. Am I off the mark there?
Susan Jackson:
You are not off the mark there. And it's a big credit to the industry. It's also a big credit to the NGO community. Because I can tell you when we started, and that's part of the reason why we were doing consolidated reports, there was a well-founded belief that published reports with good results would be the best, but there was not confidence that published reports with bad results would be seen as still being better than a non-published report. Right? So no news would be seen better than bad news, which is really not factually true. No news is no news and you really should be rewarding transparency in its own sake and then a commitment to do better.
Susan Jackson:
So those were conversations we needed to have with the companies about why they needed to get more comfortable. But those were also conversations we were having with the NGO community and they recognized that need and they started incorporating that in their dialogue and engagement with their market partners and more broadly recognizing that they realized this is a stepwise improvement and we want you to be transparent and we're here with you and yes, transparency with bad results or less than perfect results is better than non-transparent, no results, no reporting
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Sounds like in that process, you built a little bit of mutual trust between people who had very little for each other before that.
Susan Jackson:
Correct. You said that sounds expensive and it is expensive, but this is also where the independent third party auditor helps, because you have confidence and faith in the fairness of the auditor.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Yep. You'd have to be on both sides, right?
Susan Jackson:
Correct.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
The science side, the NGO side, and certainly the industry side. So fascinating. Tell us a little bit about your biggest accomplishments as an organization over this pioneering history and modern history, past 13 years have been a super actual long time for the organization. It's now no longer nascent, right? It's the model. What has this model accomplished over this time period?
Susan Jackson:
The transparency piece was huge, and not just getting the participating companies, now 26, we've grown from eight to 26, which is also a big accomplishment, getting them to be transparent. But we have over a 1000 vessels that we now also audit and get those vessels to agree to be audited. So that's a lot of auditing and I think that's a great accomplishment, the transparency and the growth of the organization. And then also staying relevant. Environmental sustainability is not a goalpost that you put here, we're good. No, there's always things that need to be improved. Things that need to get better, ways that different things can go wrong. Unintended consequences of what you thought was a good idea, was a bad idea. The research needs to continue. Research will find new problems, then you have to find solutions for those. And staying relevant, which means being willing to continue to learn things, get bad news as well as good news and then improve upon it. That's what I would say.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Yeah. Those are super accomplishments in every way. What about challenges ahead, to the point of moving gold posts? You've accomplished some things, right? This transparency, you've got a scheme down, you've got a structure down, you've got an organization down, by the way I take it those 1000 fishing vessels are all around the world.
Susan Jackson:
Yep.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Yes. Going back to your first point, we are talking about multinational business as it meets the ocean. It couldn't be something sort of more global than multinational tuna processing and the fishing for that resource as it moves in a way that knows no borders around, I think three quarters of the world, if not five eights of the world, however the oceans are measured these days. They're growing. So they're gaining on the land masses. We know that. Those are extraordinary accomplishments. But of that moving gold post, what do you kind of see right now when it comes to sustainability in this area and the organizational structures, anything else, what are your kind of immediate and even long term challenges ahead to the extent that you can think those through?
Susan Jackson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). The challenges really remain the same but different. One of the most unique things about ISSF at the beginning was the belief and the understanding that there's no competition here. We need to work together to improve the state of the tuna stocks and their ecosystem. But you can never really take competition out. Right? And so I came up with the term corralled competition, which is creating things like transparent compliance reports that are corralled by our governance. And then let them go talk about how great theirs are or how poor other ones are. And every time a new topic comes up, that still is something that we have to confront, but keeping it within the way we work and social issues on tuna vessels and fishing vessels writ large and concerns about treatment of workers. This is another area that we are now I think moving in that transition from a competitive position to one of recognizing that it needs to be tackled at a much larger scale to have a meaningful impact in improving the conditions and the checks and the auditing for conditions to address social issues.
Susan Jackson:
And anytime you move into a new area like that, you have the same problems we had before, which is people agree on what the endpoint is, they agree on the headline, but there's disagreements on how to get there. And there's even disagreements on definition. How do you define sustainable back in the day? Or how do you now equate or fair or how much is too much, how long is too long? Everybody has different opinions on those. And finding that dispassionate voice of the scientist that can help you find the answers and then agreeing on the pathway. So competition always comes up. And so how you use the tools and the governance that you have to find a meaningful pathway, to address the problem and then credible way to implement and demonstrate its implementation of the solutions.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Now that's a super interesting problem when you think about it conceptually and practically, right? Because if you can't do something yourself, you can't compete to do it by yourself, but that doesn't mean that different people who come together to do something collectively that they can't do on their own, that is nothing but good. It doesn't mean that everybody doesn't have a different idea about how to do that. Right?
Susan Jackson:
Right. And it also doesn't mean that they don't want to try first to do it alone to get an early adopter gold star.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Right, right.
Susan Jackson:
Human nature.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Right. And that's where I was headed with this, is that breakdown is purely the human dynamic. Right? Because there's no logic to it whatsoever. It is purely the human dynamic turning just completely from what is just fundamentally on its face, rational. Just as a "competition lawyer," right? You can usually ask the first question you'd ever ask about a joint venture that is a good one is, well, what are you trying to do and can you do it yourself? Right? And if the answer to that is, no, and here's why. There's usually a pretty good reason that people need to do it together.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
But you can see that anytime you try to have collective action, even for positive change, that is fundamentally necessarily got to be collective. And we can't fix the world's climate one nation at a time, you really do need collective action. You see the competition again.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
I talked to a guest last week about green hydrogen, and I was interested in this problem, but from a different angle that I'm seeing is fairly relevant right now, as we talk about tuna. Some folks are converting and some nations are really getting behind green hydrogen, which literally would overnight solve the climate crisis or the emissions, I should say, crisis, climate is a physics issue that may have already reached certain tipping points. And it's really just a matter of slowing the decline of human existence on the earth. I don't know, but it depends on who you talk to.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
But there was this question I asked the guest about how different nations were adopting green hydrogen, comparatively, and the Chileans and the Australians are already in full adoption and exporting it, trying to become the green hydrogen exporters. Right? It's an area where collective action would be super me and almost needs to be there, but there's national behavior that's even sort of competitive to be that first gold star, to be that first mover, or grab an exporter market. Which I think is the reason though, that these collaborations work, right? If there weren't some industrial incentive to do them, they'd be hard to pull together. What are your thoughts on that?
Susan Jackson:
Sure. I think you're right. Tuna is the classic example, right? If you don't start managing them well, then you don't have anything to sell at some point, right? Or at least not anything that is affordable or that your current consumer would be willing to pay for that product. So it is ultimately a question of business survival, which is why people say that industry isn't really caring or isn't really in the game, they're absolutely caring. This is their business, without tuna, they don't have one.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Right. It's like a logger without a forest. Right?
Susan Jackson:
Correct.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Unless there's trees, then it doesn't matter whether this logger or that logger, there's nothing to get. Yeah. Super interesting stuff, Susan. In your Ted Talk, you described ISSF as a model, bigger than its niche. Have you seen that become more true or less true?
Susan Jackson:
Oh, I think it's more true. Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about the emission standards for cars in the United States, right? We had a standard and then suddenly we had a laxer standard and then who fixed it? The auto industry and the state of California said, "No, we want to go to a higher standard." There are all sorts of groups coming together to address environmental problems. And they are almost always cross-streams as far as the collaborations that are there with industry science, government and RFMOs. Because even ISSF’s point is we don't want to do it. We want to make it so that the governments can have the political will to do it. You ultimately need the governments to own the issues on the environment, but you need the industry and the scientists and the NGOs to get it there faster, to innovate around it, to maybe improve it beyond where the government is. But the government always needs to be cementing that floor and moving the floor up.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Super interesting example. You've been so generous with your time, but I'd like to take a little bit more of it and ask you another question. One thing I've seen come up a lot recently is this term greenwashing, because I share your view that you were a model bigger than your niche. And so we have seen those kinds of sparks fly, like the example you gave, that creates this confluence of industry incentive, science and environmental community to participate together in collective ways, so much so that it's become a hallmark of equity investment now, both publicly and privately, which is a fascinating development that is likely to only accelerate this notion that your model is a model bigger than its niche. That's been proven.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
At the same time, what I've seen recently in the news is that every time industry tries to participate constructively here, the organization gets accused of being a greenwasher. In other words, almost any time the industry tries to say, "Okay, we'll get together with science, government and environment and will participate." And they do. Whatever organization that is becomes a "greenwasher." And that just seems utterly ridiculous to me. So what I wanted to do is use a little time here at the end to throw out to you, number one, are you seeing that at all or is that just a fiction of my own reading? And second, either way, is there something folks can do about that?
Susan Jackson:
Yeah. It's not just a fiction of your own reading. I don't know if it's new. I think that you're seeing it more because there is actually more of this industry engagement, which is good on environmental issues. So it's happening more and they're all being accused of greenwashing. But is the rate any different, it's probably not any different. I think that this is one of the advantages ISSF had of being an early adapter. It was certainly something that was thrown at us or that it was a concern. And I talked about how we took a three to four year period to improve our pathway of transparency around compliance and defining what we were going to do, defining how we were going to prove it, and then having an external audit and then reporting.
Susan Jackson:
I think what's happening now is that those middle two steps are lacking, right? And so it's, "We're going to be carbon neutral." And we're carbon neutral, but there's almost a rush to make a claim about your intent, and I think the need, and I think everybody, this is just my 2 cents. I think every organization that says that, you can say what you're going to work on. There's nothing wrong at the time you launch with that, with saying who your partners are and the issues you're aiming to tackle. But I think then it's really important to take a public pause, if you didn't do it upfront and lay out a very clear pathway, how you're going to tackle it, how you're going to measure it, how you're going to report against measuring. And then you're probably still going to have to put up with greenwashing claims for a couple of years, until you get some reporting, against the things you're going to report.
Susan Jackson:
And where I think it's falling apart now is not doing those intermediate building blocks and articulating from the beginning, a recognition and a pathway that gets you to credible, transparent metric, unmeaningful things. That's the other bit, meaningful things, are you doing what is actually going to help? It's boring and it's details, but it's the work you need to do if you want your initiative to be credible.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Yeah. That's a super roadmap and I like the way you described the gold rush to stake out your claim of intent, but you got to prove, you got to prove that, I think is what you're saying at the end of the day, you got to prove it in a way that people can watch and measure and that you can communicate. I also really liked your point just now, Susan, that this is nothing new. And that's encouraging because that means that there is a model like yours, for folks who have overcome claims like that perhaps, or at least laid out a model of how to deal with them and engage those stakeholders meaningfully. I think another phrase from your own Ted Talk, turn your adversaries into your allies and what a wonderful job you have done. Susan, with your permission, I'd like to link the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, ISSF website to the show notes.
Susan Jackson:
Sure.
Michael P.A. Cohen:
[crosstalk] may want to click through. And thank you so much for coming back on the Nota Bene podcast. So great to have you.
Susan Jackson:
Thanks for having me
Michael P.A. Cohen:
Well, that's it for this week, folks. I hope you've enjoyed the show. I certainly have. Next week, we will turn into our fourth quarterly check-ins, starting with Oliver Heinisch in Europe. Until then, be well.
Contact Information:
Susan’s Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlI25M91Kbc
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