SALT was born from a need to bring together disparate initiatives, ideas, and people to advance progress in seafood traceability. This call to action united governments, industry, and organizations into a global movement working to make seafood traceable. SALT’s community, grown to more than 2,000 stakeholders worldwide, has developed key resources to accelerate your electronic catch documentation and traceability (eCDT) journey, whether you’re just starting to design a program or trying to push past barriers that are holding back your implementation success.

End-to-end electronic traceability enables users to identify and document the history, distribution, location, and application of products, parts, and materials. This helps ensure the reliability of sustainability claims in the areas of human rights, labor (including health and safety), the environment, and anti-corruption (including illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing). SALT’s From Bait to Plate graphic illustrates the eCDT journey of seafood from harvest to consumer.

Seafood traceability programs come in different sizes and are at different phases of maturity. Wherever you are in your journey, the Principles and Pathway lay important groundwork for any traceability program. The SALT community’s creation of the Comprehensive Traceability Principles makes figuring out where to start easier. The Principles are available in six languages, and there is a Pathway to the Principles to walk through activities to help you—whether government, industry, or NGO—initiate, design, and implement an eCDT program. Since a program is only as strong as the partnerships and the collaboration used to initiate, design, and implement it, how we work is paramount to building a lasting and scalable eCDT program. SALT puts the eCDT program users—from fishers to government officials and beyond—at the forefront. This user-centered approach is critical at every step, from program creation to implementation. To learn more about SALT’s user-centered approach and co-design process, see SALT’s recent application of the eCDT Principles & Pathway from the link below.

The data collected from comprehensive eCDT programs can feed into the relevant government institutions, agencies, or industry systems. Beyond quality control, governments and industry often seek benefits related to accessing markets, preventing the entry of IUU seafood and/or mislabeled products into markets, supporting legal and equitable working conditions, and enhancing fisheries management.

Women comprise more than 50% of the seafood workforce, but their value and contribution to the seafood sector is often unseen. Barriers to gender equality in the industry include lack of recognition, restrictive gender norms, and lack of gender-disaggregated data. eCDT programs can help address these systemic barriers.

In addition to private sector and political will, traceability systems require a commitment to transparency in data collection, data verification, capacity building for users, and adaptive management. The SALT community shares its wins and lessons learned to help others grow and avoid mistakes that come from operating in silos.