His Personal Crusade
The rest isn’t exactly history; instead, it’s more of a repeat of history. After Phillips flew to Southeast Asia, saw the crabs for himself, taught the local fisherman and their wives how to crab, and established crabbing standards (like not buying female buried crabs or any crabs smaller than five inches), the competition came and changed the game and the local ecosystems.
A sustainable fishery should be one with stable stocks, and there are community pieces as well.”
“The competition didn’t abide by the rules and would buy any size crab and would buy the female buried crab,” Phillips says.
The repeat of history soon followed as Phillips began witnessing major reductions in Asian seafood resources, like a 24 percent decrease in exports in Indonesia in 2008. “We have to do something about it before it’s too late, because on the Chesapeake Bay I’ve seen it happen in my lifetime, and in Asia I’m seeing it happening now,” he says.
But for Phillips Seafood Restaurants, a sustainable fishing industry isn’t just one where there’s an endless and self-sustaining wealth of resources. It also factors in socio-economic elements.
“A sustainable fishery should be one with stable stocks, and there are community pieces as well,” says Ed Rhodes, the U.S. director of aquaculture and sustainability at Phillips. The company has another director on site in Asia. “The fishermen themselves need to be treated fairly. There’s the whole economics; the whole chain needs to be sustainable.”
While that sounds easy enough—simply price crab products served to U.S. customers at a premium if they are labeled “sustainable”—Phillips is finding it’s anything but. Some seafood companies are vowing only to purchase Marine Stewardship Council–certified products, in which there are only 20 fisheries in the world participating. Phillips, whose company is the U.S. “pioneer” in the region, believes his company has obligations to the fisheries it’s been working with for the last two decades.
“In a fishery where we are an active player and where we can make a difference, we really want to stay with that fishery rather than abandon it,” Phillips says. “If we were only dealing with certified material at this point, and that crab fishery isn’t certified, our corporate decision might be to walk away from it, but our responsible decision is to stay engaged and invest in the fishery.”
Rhodes explains that many local fishermen find various sustainable certifications too expensive, and they are unable to afford large-scale sweeping improvements all at once.
“Until we have some numbers we could probably say, ‘Well, we don’t know if the fishery is being overfished,’” Phillips says of potentially turning a blind eye to the problem. “The bottom line is that we’ve seen a reduction in crab resources in Indonesia, and those are signs of overfishing.”
Armed with the company’s experience with the dwindling resources in the Chesapeake a quarter century before, Phillips and Rhodes went to work organizing the disjointed economy of seafood producers in Asia. “We have a lot of competition these days who produce crab in Indonesia and the Philippines, and we realized that Phillips couldn’t make this effort alone,” Phillips says.
As a result, Phillips formed the APRI—the Blue Swimming Crab Producers Association in Indonesia—and the Philippine Association of Crab Processors (PACPI). Both were formed with the main purpose of creating and enforcing sustainability measures in an industry that before had none—not even from the government.
“What I’m trying to convince these associations to understand is that we have to get the governments to realize that we have some very serious resource issues with the crab,” Phillips says, “and that they need to pass national rules and regulations to manage the industry.”
