The Chef, the Campaigners and the Corporations: Dissecting a Successful Campaign

Tonight in the UK Channel Four will update viewers on what has been described by leading environmental journalist Martin Hickman as 'one of the most successful environmental campaigns in years', and one with significant global dimensions.

In the course of 2011, the tinned tuna industry in the United Kingdom moved to significantly alter the basis of its production in order to meet sustainability concerns. The fundamental commitment made across industry is phasing out the use of fish aggregating devices (FADs) with purse seine fishing vessels, a combination that presently leads to vast quantities of bycatch globally, with top predators including endangered sharks particularly susceptible.

The transformation is clearly significant: by some measures tunas constitute the second largest wild fish catch sector in the world and the United Kingdom is the second biggest market for the tinned product. The companies in question include huge transnational players, like Tesco, ASDA (owned by Walmart), Princes (owned by Mitsubishi), John West (owned by Thai Union).

There were at least eight key ingredients to the campaign's success.

First, the work of journalists, scientists, NGOs, celebrities, chefs – and increasingly industry itself – has seen the emergence in the UK of certain norms around sustainable seafood. While standards among retailers, restaurants and suppliers are still mixed (the prestigious but odious Nobu, for example, still sells northern bluefin tuna though its menu carries the ridiculous message 'bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species pleasee ask your server for an alternative') there is now a general expectation in the United Kingdom that seafood will be sourced in the most sustainable way possible. Any failure to do so is likely to be viewed as both a breach of acceptable community standards and a betrayal of consumer trust.

Second, the specific environmental bad of purse seine FAD fishing was well established. It was the ground-breaking work of award winning journalist Charles Clover that first alerted the world to the marine carnage associated with purse seine FAD fishing in his brilliant book The End of the Line published in 2005. At the end of Clover’s forensic examination of the tinned tuna industry was the key revelation, bycatch from purse seine FAD fishing 'amounted to almost the entire cast list of Finding Nemo.' Stemming from Clover’s pioneering work, followed by NGOs and supported by new scientific research; by 2011 the ecological cost of purse seine FAD fishing was well acknowledged. An incisive major feature by Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times in January documented the problem, but crucially also linked the carnage at sea to the products on British supermarket shelves.

Third, the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (which, although it also counts scientists and NGOs among its members is basically the collective voice of big tuna) acknowledged the problem. Although corporate preferences for least cost options mean that the ISSF has not called for shifting away from purse seine FAD fishing, the organization concedes that current levels of bycatch are unacceptable. Thus, on the key issue of principle – the unacceptability of current levels of destructiveness of purse seine FAD fishing – there was no real disagreement from industry.

Fourth, as early as 2008 the UK retailer Sainsbury's had independently decided to only source its own brand tinned tuna from pole and line – a more sustainable alternative to purse seine FAD fishing with negligible levels of non-tuna bycatch. Once a retailer like Sainsburys – which sells a lot of tuna – had emerged as a champion on the issue, competitors like Tesco, Morrisons and ASDA were clearly more vulnerable to campaign pressure.

Fifth, the Pacific Island nations whose territorial waters are among the richest tuna fishing grounds on earth are actively and collectively campaigning for reform of the tuna industry, including targeting the use of FADs with purse seines.

Sixth, in January this year, Greenpeace in the UK launched a determined campaign on tinned tuna. Focused first on Tesco, then primarily Princes and finally John West, Greenpeace pursued the issue through a range of campaign tactics designed to highlight the environmental unacceptability of what the companies in question were doing. Tesco met Greenpeace’s demands in January, followed by Princes (along with ASDA) in March, Morrisons in April and John West in July.

Seventh, the normative leadership provided by English celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was absolutely crucial. Although Fearnley-Whittingstall is better known for his heroic work on the Common Fisheries Policy, he has also brought his profile, integrity and campaign nouse to the issue of tinned tuna. The problem of purse seine FAD fishing was landed on to a mass audience on screens across the UK through Fearnley-Whittingstall’s BAFTA award winning Fish Fight series, which both showcased the Greenpeace campaign and documented Fearnley-Whittingstall’s own redoutable efforts on the issue.

Eighth, a substantial if largely inchoate discourse coalition lined up with Fearnley-Whittingstall and Greenpeace. Corporate leaders on the issue – not only Sainsburys, but big players with smaller tinned tuna market shares like Waitrose and M&S had already made their progressive positions clear – and these were joined by Tesco in January. Indeed, with each corporation turning, the pressure mounted inexorably on the hold-outs. Fearnley-Whittingstall himself described the dynamic this way:

It's been one of those really interesting campaigns where concerted effort and a bit of a pincer movement between Greenpeace and Fish Fight has got an initial good result with the Tesco commitment a couple of months ago, and we have been able to apply the pressure systematically on the rest of the market. As with so many ethical consumer issues you get to the point where the ethical part of the market starts to be the majority and the unethical becomes the minority.

Charles Clover added his authority to the campaign, as did Jamie Oliver through his Twitter account. The use of FADs became the subject of questions in Parliament, columns in Private Eye and discussions at Selfridges. Leading scientists were quoted on the issue. And the public became involved, with stickers appearing on tins of tuna on the shelves, social media lighting up and almost 100,000 emails being dispatched to various corporate headquarters.

Taken together, these factors proved irresistable.

Hugh's Fish fight returns tonight on Channel Four at 9PM.  (later amendment - can now be seen on 4OD).

You can follow David Ritter on Twitter here. Disclosure – the author was heavily involved with this campaign through his work at Greenpeace.