Wikis, webs and modern markets

John Thackara on wikis, webs … and the price of fish. Additional material by Anna Simpson.

It’s mardi: market day in the small coastal town of Ganges in southern France, and I find myself at my regular independent fish stall. The friendly couple who run it point out what will taste best today – and I’m grateful to them, with no other way to make a picking from the fine spread of fish before me. Hand-written tags tell me things like “Morue, l’Atlantique” and a price per kilo. But I have no idea how or when the cod was caught, who caught it, and how it travelled to my town.

In system design terms, I am an ‘actor’ at a ‘touch point’ at the end of a ‘chain of custody’ running from the fishing vessel to the dock, from the dock to a processor or wholesaler, and from there, in this case, to my fishmonger.

In other words, I am buying blind.

I do carry around a credit card sized consumer guide to buying fish published by WWF, and I pull it out in restaurants, where one can consult it discreetly whilst reading the menu. But standing in front of my cheerful fishmonger, with a queue of people behind me, I hesitate. It’s too small and fiddly to read easily; the names on the card don’t always match the ones on the stall; and, above all, I’m not sure I possess a light enough social touch to engage the fishmonger in a positive exchange about sustainable sourcing.

The morue’s the pity! In a truly sustainable fish system, all actors, from producers to sellers to consumers, would be connected in a web of relationships, rather than in a one-way, poorly linked chain. But most food systems are based on proprietary networks in which access to information is controlled by powerful supermarkets and wholesalers. In the UK, for example, five chains control 80% of food sales. They derive immense competitive advantage from their control over information flows – and handsome profits follow.

It’s not that large firms are filled with evil people. On the contrary, retail giants like Walmart, Carrefour and Elior (Europe’s third largest contract catering firm) are doing a lot to promote sustainable fishing. Walmart, for example, is committed to selling only Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified fish in its 3,700 US stores, and was halfway towards meeting that goal by January 2009.

But the main problem is not a lack of information. A raft of ecolabels has been launched, and Iceland, Sweden and Ireland run their own labelling systems for fish. However, the multiplicity of such schemes, many of which are based on contradictory criteria, makes it harder for consumers to make informed choices about what they are buying.

One problem is that global accreditation schemes, such as the MSC’s blue ecolabel, do not take into account airfreight used to transport their products. The same argument applies to the huge amounts of energy used by retailers to display fish in brightly-lit, chilled cabinets. Everything in a food system needs to be measured and accounted for – and this is the real challenge. 

Technology can help. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new service brings Seafood Watch recommendations directly to your iPhone (in the US only so far). But although a step up on the WWF leaflet, it is still based on a linear model: the service does not – yet – let you confer with intermediaries further up the fish supply chain.

Peer-to-peer networks, wikis, participatory mapping and mobile communications are only part of the answer. Food supply systems are also social systems – just like the ecosystems they dip into – and technology alone cannot orchestrate the multitude of actors and stakeholders involved. For food systems to be resilient, we need a radical reconfiguration of relationships between producers and consumers. We need to measure what matters throughout the lifecycle of the produce – turning supply chains into webs, or ecologies, and putting in place new, information-sharing relationships.

VOX POP
Fortuné Alexander
Global Marketing Director, Sony Ericsson

“We’re looking at green innovation in two ways. First of all, how we can reduce the environmental footprint of our phones and lead the way for the industry. This has resulted in the recent launch of our GreenHeart flagship handsets. Secondly, we’re exploring ways that mobile and digital technology can make it easier to live sustainably.”

One place where such ‘ecologies’ are already forming is the capital of the Congo, Kinshasa. Along the main streets, and at sought-after spots by crossroads, you find wooden stalls with young women in bright florals selling local fruit, veg and ‘Thomson’ – or fried fish. Their produce comes from local fishing cooperatives and market gardeners who, with the National Support Service for Urban and Peri-Urban Horticulture (SENAHUP), help to maintain ecosystems by suggesting small-scale solutions to local problems – like the installation of dikes to keep the N’djili River from flooding their plots; or the rehabilitation of access roads.

According to the International Development Research Centre, this is a living example of a ‘multi-actor ecosystem participation approach’, or MEPA – where farmers, street sellers, policy makers and unions share responsibility for local ecosystems.

A similar approach is also being pioneered in the North. In the fast-growing Transition Towns movement, for example, community groups are mapping food production trails and watersheds as the basis for a more holistic, regional approach to food security. These maps and other web-based tools are not meant to replace face-to-face contact – quite the opposite. Rather, they enable producers and consumers to identify each other and facilitate dialogue.

A particularly inspiring UK model is a restaurant-led initiative: the Pisces Responsible Fish Restaurants. Pisces links good fishermen with chefs, with the aim of building up long term relationships. Chefs go out on boats with the crew, to see for themselves how the fish are caught. This is a huge commitment of time and effort – and trust on the part of the fishers. But it’s also a worthwhile investment in the future.

The lesson here is that there can be no one global ‘sustainable fish system’. Instead, we must look for practical ways to help a multitude of different models – like MEPA in the South, or Pisces in the North – succeed and multiply.

John Thackara is Director of the international knowledge network, Doors of Perception.

4 January 2010

Anna Simpson