Promote your social and ecological advantage as a small-scale fisher and the quality of your products, especially commercially underappreciated resources which are often hidden delicacies.
Explore ways to shorten the value chain between you and customers and to connect to them, including via chefs and HORECA professionals.
Embrace branding and labelling schemes, appear at festivities or gastronomic events.
Could existing technology and other tools (e.g., apps, social media) work for you in reaching the consumers more efficiently?
Keep yourself updated on how other SSF communities have overcome their challenges and which solutions could work for you. Reach out to them or join a network.
Coordinate with like-minded fishers to improve your situation. Is there any scope to improve your organisation, leadership or business sides?
Explore ways to connect more directly between you and the fishers, where SSF settle a fair price.
Buy and eat local fish, lower your carbon footprint and appreciate local specialities wherever you go. Explore also festivals, go on a fishing tour and chat with chefs about the provenance of the fish they use.
Search for diversity in your dishes and explore seasonal and unfamiliar catch.
Support selective, seasonal fishing of a variety of different species, which are not threatened. Adapt your demand to the supply and not the other way around.
Keep yourself updated on the options to buy seafood, also those less conventional (using apps, social media, etc).
Consume fresh and unprocessed fish species and combine it with a healthy lifestyle.
Meet fishers in the fishing port, ask about species they catch and how to prepare them, learn more about fishing traditions, and how SSF fishers guard our ocean.
Do you want to set up a consumer group to sustain community-supported fishing?
To contribute to sustainable development of the Mediterranean, the LabMAF project seeks to engender a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable small-scale fishing sector in the region, and promotes a revival of the vibrant small-scale and low-impact fishing communities that form an integral part of the rich history of this region. The project promotes small-scale and low-impact fisheries in so far as they promote fishing practices based on sustainable development principles and enhancement of livelihoods of fishing communities.
The document sets out principles and standards of behaviour for responsible practices with a view to encouraging a respectful use and stewardship of the Mediterranean. It provides a reference point for the promotion of good practices often conducted by the Mediterranean small-scale fisheries relating to low environmental impact, ecosystem approach, concern for social justice and local benefits, and protection of cultural heritage. As such, the guidelines are addressed to fishers who can use them to advance and consolidate responsible practices; to citizens and consumers who can use them to discern and value the products by low-impact small-scale fishers of the Mediterranean, and to policy-makers who can understand them as a recommended direction for improving policies and other legal and institutional frameworks and instruments.
The idea of the guidelines is to encourage incremental progress. Further, they should always be interpreted in a manner that is sensitive to local specificities. The guidelines should be revised regularly.
OBJECTIVE: To allow the fishers to lead decent livelihoods and ensure fair payment across the supply chain
This principle seeks to ensure that the food chain is simple, short, traceable and transparent, consumers can access healthy and sustainably produced food, while generating fair economic returns in the supply chain, and fosters resilient, cohesive and interconnected small-scale producing communities, promoting fair trade, fair access to resources. A system that fosters a new governance where all local stakeholders are involved and held responsible, so that communities can exert greater control over the resources on which they depend, especially for their food production. A system that makes visible and rewards the role of women and attracts young generations.
OBJECTIVE: To maintain and protect traditional fishing practices, knowledge and livelihoods while embracing innovation and creativity
Without anchoring too much in the past or neither devaluing the modernization, this principle seeks a good balance, recovering and valorizing the traditions and techniques which are compatible with sustainability components, preserving local and traditional knowledge, while promoting innovation, creativity and social entrepreneurship.
OBJECTIVE: To support low-impact fisheries practices and ensure ecological sustainability of fisheries
The principle seeks to ensure that the food chain has a low environmental impact, respecting seasons, preserving the sea-based resources on which the food system depends; helping to mitigate climate change and adapting to its impacts and reversing the loss of biodiversity and food waste, taking into account the interconnectivity of ecosystems.
OBJECTIVE: To ensure a safe and quality working environment of fishers and offer good quality and safe product
This principle seeks to contribute to food security, nutrition and public health – making sure that everyone has access to sufficient, nutritious, sustainable food that upholds high standards of safety and quality, while ensuring occupational health, safety and fair working conditions;